LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. Copyright No.. 

SheltJL£U£0? 



.,. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 



ALSO 



THE IDEAS WHICII INSPIRED IT 
AND WERE INSPIRED BY IT 



BY 



MARY R. ALLING-ABER 




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t^yis 



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NEW YORK 
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1897 



k3 l - 



Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rig/its reserved. 



TO 

PAULINE AGASSIZ SHAW 



PREFACE 



In August of 1SS0, during a railway journey, I 
had some conversation with a stranger on educa- 
tional topics. Some features of the conversation 
being reported, they reached one who was suffi- 
ciently interested in new things to wish to see any 
reasonable thing tried, and was able to provide 
opportunity for the trial. 

As without the opportunity I could not have 
made the experiment, it is with no small degree 
of gratitude that I ask the reader to give to the 
maker of the opportunity — Mrs. Pauline Agassiz 
Shaw — due credit for whatever is helpful in the 
pages of this book. 

Acknowledgment is clue also to the teachers 
who aided in the work, since it was their patient, 
loyal efforts to give the plan a fair and complete 
trial — each in the parts assigned to her — that 
largely contributed to the final results. These 
teachers were Miss Anna B. Sheldon, Nina 
Moore, Dora V. Williams, Clara F. Palmer, 
and Pachael C. Clarke. 

Whenever, in expressing opinions, I have tran- 
scended the limits of the experiment or inferences 
logically deducible from it, I have been made bold 



Vi PREFACE 

to do so by the fact that a considerable body of 
opinion which, prior to the experiment, was the- 
oretical only, was proved practicable or reasonable 
by the results of the experiment; and, although 
well aware that to prove one thing does by no 
means prove another or a different thing, the 
opinions not proved are so similar in kind and so 
allied by presumptive reasoning to those that were 
proved that their inclusion seems justified in a 
work of this kind. 

Prior to the experiment I had ten years of teach- 
ing in high and normal schools. From one-half 
to one third of the time allotted to a subject had 
been spent in teaching the student how to use his 
mind, to use books, specimens, etc. ; in other words, 
how to study. This waste was irritating and pit- 
iable in view of the short time allowed to subjects, 
and I could not be reconciled to the notion that 
an adult mind must so generally lack power to 
work economically, trustworthily, and discrimi- 
natingly. 

It was these conditions, superinduced on a ten- 
dency previously formed — during a course at the 
Oswego State Normal School — to watch the pupil's 
mind more than the subject being taught, which 
forced, at last, a conviction that mind per se was 
not to blame, and that bad mental habits and 
mental life devoid of habit were legitimate prod- 
ucts of our processes of education. There natu- 
rally followed some devising of means to lesson the 
evils, and so grew up a desire to experiment with 
children. 

At the opening of the experiment in 1881, so far 



PREFACE vii 

as I know, natural-science studies had not been 
made an integral part of any primary-school course, 

and literature and history in such grades were 
mostly unthought of. Some object-lessons had 
dealt with natural objects and phenomena, and 
some stories and poems had been drawn from lit- 
erature and history; but the uses of these had not 
been of the sort recommended in this book ; sci- 
ence, literature, and history had not been made the 
chief objects of study in primary nor in the gram- 
mar grades. Neither are they so now, but long 
strides in that direction have been taken in many 
places ; so that all which my experiment was meant 
to demonstrate as feasible now bids fair to become 
the common usage in education. 

If such usage were established and everywhere 
accepted as a matter of course, this book would 
have no excuse for being ; but because it is not so, 
and educational thought is still feeling its way 
towards the same ends and usages for which my 
experiment was made, this book is offered with the 
hope that it may do something to increase the im- 
petus of the present movement. 



CONTENTS 



I' A OK 

Preface v 

Paet I. — TnE Experiment 

I. IN BOSTON 3 

II. AT ENGLEWOOD 31 

Part II.— Ideas Underlying the Experiment 

I. QUALITY OP STUDIES 47 

II. ORDER OP STUDIES 55 

III. EFFECTS OF STUDIES GG 

IV. ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES .... 82 

Part III.— Some Detail about the Teaching of 
Special Subjects 

i. science 107 

II. history 122 

in. literature 141 

iv. language 15G 

v. mathematics 1G7 

vi. industrial training 175 

VII. MEANS OF EXPRESSION 186 

VIII. AT HOME 199 

Part IV.— Suggestions about the Atmosphere of 
School-rooms 

i. "art for art's sake " 221 

ii. method 227 

iii. the school as environment 231 

iv. mirth in the school-room 240 

Conclusion 243 



AN EXPEKLMEXT IN EDUCATION 



part IF 

THE EXPERIMENT 



in BOSTON* 

In October, 1881, a primary department was 
added to a private school in Boston, Mass., and 
the control of it given to me, for the purpose of 
making an experiment in education. While it 
was hoped the primary would sustain the usual 
relation to the higher departments, the propri- 
etor guaranteed freedom of action for three 
years, and generously furnished the means re- 
quired. Gratitude is due to others also, espe- 
cially to the teachers who assisted in some part 
of the work. 

The aim of the experiment was to see if the 
child may not be introduced at once to the foun- 
dations of all learning — the natural and physical 
sciences, mathematics, literature including lan- 
guage, and history — and at the same time be 
given a mastery of such elements of reading, 
writing, and number as usually constitute pri- 
mary education. 



* Reprinted, by permission, from The Popular Science Month- 
ly for January, 1892, where it bore the title "An Experiment 
in Education." 



4 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

The experiment began with nine children be- 
tween the ages of five and a half and seven years. 
With scales and measuring rod each child was 
weighed and measured, while such questions were 
asked as " Have you been weighed before ?" 
" When I" " What did you weigh then ?" " How 
does your weight to-day compare with that?" 
The shyest children forgot they were at school, 
and chatted freely while watching and compar- 
ing results. By questions as to why a present 
weight or measure was greater than a former 
one, the statement " Children grow " was ob- 
tained. Questions about the causes of growth led 
to the statements " Children eat," " Children 
sleep," " Children play." A question as to 
whether anything besides children grows started 
a talk about animals, in which were given the 
statements "Animals grow," "Animals eat," 
" Animals sleep," "Animals play." In like man- 
ner similar statements about plants were ob- 
tained. The children were easily led from think- 
ing of a particular child, animal, or plant to the 
general conception and the use of the general 
term. This was the first lesson in natural sci- 
ence. 

To recall the first general conception reached 
in the science lesson a child was asked, " Nina, 
what did you say children do?" "Children 
grow," she replied. I said, " I will put upon the 
blackboard something that means what Nina 
said," and wrote in Spencerian script, " Children 
grow." In response to invitation the children 
eagerly gave the general statements gained in 



IK BOSTON 5 

the science lesson. Each was written upon the 
board and read by the child who gave it. They 
were told that what they had said and I had 
written were sentences. Each child read his own 
sentence again. This was the first reading lesson. 

One by one each child stood by me at the board, 
repeated his sentence, and watched while it was 
written. He was then taught to hold a crayon, 
and left to write his sentence beneath the model. 
When a first attempt was finished, the sentence 
was written in a new place, and the child repeated 
his effort at copying. In this manner each made 
from one to four efforts, each time telling what 
his copy meant and what he wished his effort to 
mean. None of this work was erased before the 
children had gone. This was the first writing 
lesson. 

The children were led to count their class- 
mates, their sentences on the blackboards, the 
tables, chairs, and other objects in the school- 
room. It was found that all could use accurately 
the terms one, two, three, and four, and the sym- 
bols 1, 2, 3, 4 were put on the board as meaning 
what they said, and their power to connect these 
symbols with the ideas that they represent was 
tested in various ways. This was the first num- 
ber lesson. 

The children were shown a magnetic needle, 
and led to note the direction of its points when at 
rest, and the terms north and south were given. 
This was the first geography lesson. 

After recess each child read his sentence, wrote 
it once, and then the subject of the science lesson 



6 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

was pursued further. After special answers to 
the question, "What do children eat?" the gen- 
eral statement was obtained, " Children eat plants 
and animals.'' Similarly, the children were led 
to give " Animals eat plants and animals." Then 
came the question, "What do plants eat?" One 
suggested the sunshine, another the rain, another 
the air, others the ground or dirt, for which the 
term soil was given. It was concluded that rain, 
air, and sunshine help plants to grow, and that 
some of their food must come from the soil ; and 
the general statement was given, "Plants get 
food from the soil." Then I asked, " Where does 
the soil come from?" Before wonder had given 
way to opinion I said, " If you bring luncheons 
and extra wraps to-morrow, we will go to the 
country and try to find out where the soil comes 
from." A poem of Longfellow's was read, and 
the children were dismissed. 

On the second morning the children came 
bounding in before nine o'clock, eager to find 
and read their sentences, which each did without 
hesitation ; and until nine o'clock they amused 
themselves finding and reading one another's sen- 
tences, teaching and challenging in charming 
style. A few minutes later we started on our 
first field lesson in science. An hour's ride in 
street-cars brought us to the open country. We 
went into a small field where a ledge of rock pre- 
sented a bold front. " Children," I said, "an an- 
swer to our question is in this field. I wish each 
of you to find the answer for himself, to speak to 
no one until he thinks he has found it, and then 



IK BOSTON 7 

to whisper it to me." Soberly they turned away, 
and I seated myself and waited. One child looked 
up at the sky, another at the ground, one began 
to pull over some gravel, another to dig in the 
soil — most to do some aimless thing because they 
knew not what to do. After a while some began 
to climb the ledge and to feel of it. Suddenly 
one of these darted to me and breathlessly whis- 
pered, " I think the soil comes from the rock over 
there." " Well, don't you tell," I whispered back. 
The sun climbed higher, but I waited until the 
last child brought me that whispered reply. Call- 
ing them together, I said : " You have all brought 
me the same answer. Why do you think soil 
comes from this rock?" They turned to the 
ledge, picked off the loose exterior, and showed 
me the same in masses at the base. A hammer 
was produced, with which they picked away the 
rock until it became too hard for them to break. 
I then said, " We see that a kind of soil comes 
from this rock, but what kind did we come to 
learn about ?" " The soil that plants get food 
from," they replied. " How do you know that 
any plants can get food from this soil ?" I asked. 
Instinctively they turned to the cliff; there were 
grasses and weeds growing in the talus at the 
base, and in crevices all up its front and sides ; 
these they pulled, and showed me the roots with 
the rock soil clinging to them. By referring to 
the work with the hammer and comparing what 
they picked off with the hard mass underneath, 
they were led to variously describe the process of 
passing from rock to soil, and finally the state- 



8 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

raent was obtained, " Rock deca^ys to make soil." 
After luncheon and a bit of play, the children 
were led to speak of rocks and soils seen else- 
where. Telling the children to shut their eyes 
and try to picture what I said, I told them that 
the earth is round like a ball, and is a mass of 
rock with a little soil on the outside of it ; that if 
a giant could take the earth in his hand, he might 
peel or scrape off the soil as Ave take a carpet 
from the floor, only the soil would seem much 
thinner than the carpet, because the earth is so 
big. All had travelled in railway trains, and had 
such impressions of their swiftness that this illus- 
tration was used : Suppose we start for the cen- 
tre of the earth on a train. Travelling day and 
night, it would take nearly a week to reach the 
centre, and another week from there to the sur- 
face again ; and all day while we watched, and 
all night while Ave slept, Ave should be rushing 
through the rock ; and if Ave came out through 
the thickest layer of soil, it would take but a feAV 
seconds to pass through it. Then, telling them 
to open their ejes, I took a peach Avhose rind was 
thin and peeled smoothly from the pulp, spoke of 
the giant as I drew off the rind, and told them 
that the soil is thinner on the rock ball of earth 
than that rind on the peach. A few remaining 
minutes Avere spent in observing some pine-trees 
and barberry bushes groAving near. 

On the third day, after reading the sentences 
already on the board — of Avhich each child be- 
sides his own read one or more others — the fol- 
lowing sentences Avere easily elicited : " Children 



IN BOSTON 9 

eat plants and animals. Animals eat plants and 
animals. Plants get food from the soil. The soil 
comes from the rock. Rock decays to make soil." 
These were written on the blackboard, read, and 
copied by the children as on the first day. This 
was the natural science, reading, and writing of 
the third day. In number, the children added 
and subtracted ones by making groups and join- 
ing and leaving one another. In geography the 
first lesson was recalled, and the terms east and 
west associated with the appropriate points. 

On the fourth day, after the children had re- 
told what they had learned in the science lessons, 
they were shown a globe, and asked to imagine 
one as large as the room would hold, and how, to 
represent the earth, they must think it all rock, 
with only a thin layer of dust to represent the 
soil. In geography they were shown a map of 
the school-room, and led to see its relations to the 
room, and the relative positions of objects in the 
room and on the map. The next day, on another 
map, they traced their route to the country, and 
located the field and ledge of rock where their 
question was answered. In the fifth day's sci- 
ence lesson the children were led to speak of rain 
and wind as washing and blowing off the decayed 
rock and exposing fresh surfaces, and so increas- 
ing the decay, and to give the following summary : 
" Without decay of rock there would be no soil ; 
if no soil, no plants, no animals, no people." In 
reading they had seventeen sentences, which they 
read without hesitation and wrote with some re- 
semblance to the originals. In number, none failed 



10 AX EXPERIMENT IX EDUCATION 

to count to ten and to add and subtract ones to 
ten. Each day a passage of poetry was read at 
the opening and closing of the session ; little songs 
were taught, gentle gymnastic exercises were in- 
troduced between the lessons, and the free-arm 
movement in making long straight lines was 
added to their lessons in writing. This work of 
the first week is given to show how the experi- 
ment was begun. The classes entering the sec- 
ond and third years were started with different 
sets of lessons, but substantially on the same lines. 
Throughout the three years reading was taught 
as in the first week. When there were enough 
sentences to make a four-page leaflet of print, 
they were printed and read in that form. The 
first transfer from script to print was made at the 
end of six weeks. The printed leaflets were dis- 
tributed ; the children merely glanced at them ; 
as yet they were of less interest than the objects 
usually distributed. I said, " Look at the papers; 
see if there is anything on them that } T ou have 
seen before." Soon one hand was raised, then 
another, and another. " Rosamond, what have 
you found ?" " I think one of my sentences is 
here, but it don't look just like the one on the 
board." In less than ten minutes, by comparison 
of script and print, they read the whole leaflet, 
each pointing out " my sentences." After a few 
readings the children took the leaflets home, the 
sentences were erased from the boards, and the 
same process repeated with the new matter that 
was accumulating. The reader may think there 
was great waste of time and effort, since the new 



IN" BOSTON" 11 

vocabulary and the written and printed symbols 
must have been forgotten almost as soon as 
learned. I expected the children to forget much, 
and was surprised to find that they did not. One 
morning in March a visitor who was looking over 
the accumulated leaflets asked to have them read. 
I told her they had been read when first printed 
only ; but she urged the test, so I distributed 
them as they happened to come. The first leaf- 
let fell to the youngest girl, and I think I was 
more amazed than our visitor when she read it 
without faltering. The visitor asked her, " What 
does palmately- veined mean, where you read 'The 
leaf of the cotton-plant is palmately -veined ' 1 " 
The child replied, " I can show what it means bet- 
ter than I can tell it." " Show us, then, Marjorie," 
I said. The child drew on the board a fairly cor- 
rect outline of a cotton-plant leaf, inserted its pal- 
mate veining, and turning to the visitor pointed 
to that veining. All the leaflets were read with- 
out help, nothing was forgotten, neither ideas nor 
words, as the visitor assured herself by questions. 
No effort was made to use a special vocabulary, 
to repeat words, to avoid scientific terms ; there 
was no drill in phonics or spelling ; no attention 
was given to isolated words as words — a thought 
was the unit and basis of expression. In the 
science lessons the minds of the children were in- 
tent on the getting of ideas and the expression of 
them. Direction to look or think again usually 
sufficed to change vague, wordy expressions into 
clear, terse ones by giving the child clear and ac- 
curate conceptions. When the child's own vo- 



12 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

cabulary was exhausted, he was promptly helped 
to words by classmates or teacher, the effort being 
to use the speech of cultivated people. 

At first the reading could by no means keep 
pace with the science lessons : from the mass of 
expressions obtained some were selected for the 
reading and writing matter. "With increase of 
power to remember forms and combinations of 
letters and words, the number of sentences was 
increased, until what was gained in the science 
lessons was reproduced in the reading lessons. 
This increase was rapid. From the first field les- 
son two sentences — eleven words — only could be 
taken, while a field lesson near the close of the 
second year yielded ninety-seven sentences — over 
eleven hundred words. In the former the sen- 
tences Avere written on the board and read every 
day for five weeks ; in the latter they were taken 
down in pencil by the teacher as the children gave 
them, arranged according to topics, printed, and 
presented in the printed form for the first read- 
ing. There was little hesitation in that reading, 
so vivid were the impressions from such a day 
out-of-doors. 

During the first year a little reading matter 
was drawn from lessons in literature and history. 
This was gradually increased during the second 
and third years. Still the sentences for reading 
were taken chiefly from the science lessons, be- 
cause there could be more certainty of the child's 
having 1 accurate and well-defined ideas as the 
basis of each expression, and the sentences could 
be more completely his own. In March of the 



IK BOSTOK 13 

first year reading-books were introduced. At the 
first trial they took S win ton's Easy Steps for Lit- 
tle Feet, and in twelve minutes read a page-and- 
a-half story. Of their own accord they sought 
and independently obtained from the context the 
meaning of all but two of the unfamiliar words, 
and gave to express the meanings either the exact 
words of the book or synonymous ones, for which 
those of the book were substituted. After this 
they read from books whenever such reading 
could be related to their other work — not much 
otherwise. While the production by the children 
of the bulk of their reading matter was a promi- 
nent feature, this was not the object of the ex- 
periment, but merely an adjunct to the chief end 
in view. Nor were the science topics selected 
with reference to the reading matter, but on their 
own merits, mutual relations, and the capacities 
of the children. 

As soon as a child's writing on the blackboard 
could be read by his classmates — copy being erased 
— he began to write at his desk with pencil on 
unruled paper, the copy being still written on the 
board. When all had reached this stage, concert 
arm and finger movements were taught. During 
the second and third yeajs the forms of the let- 
ters and combining strokes were analyzed, and 
each drawn on a large scale to accurate measure- 
ments. 

The children saw no misspelled words, and were 
not asked to spell or write isolated words. Dur- 
ing the first and second years the}^ usually had a 
copy from which they wrote. In the third year 



14 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

they wrote original exercises. They were told to 
ask, when not sure how to write a word. The 
word was written on the board : no effort was 
made to have them think how a word should 
look, no matter how many times they had seen it 
written and printed. 

Work in the natural and physical sciences, start- 
ing with broad conceptions, was carried forward 
along various lines, care being taken to show rela- 
tions, and to lead the children to regard them- 
selves as a part of nature. In mineralogy and 
geology, the paving, building, and ornamental 
stones most used in Boston ; the ores of the prin- 
cipal metals, and their products ; graphite and 
the making of pencils ; gypsum and halite, were 
studied, each child getting his knowledge from 
specimens before him. Each was furnished with 
a testing outfit, including what a field geologist 
commonly carries, except the blowpipe and re- 
agents to use with it ; and these children from six 
to ten soon learned to use the outfit with as 
much skill as any adults whom I have taught. 

In physics, lessons were given on extension and 
gravity ; on the solid, liquid, and gaseous states 
of matter ; on heat as the force producing expan- 
sion and contraction ; on the evaporation, conden- 
sation, and freezing of water, with results in dew, 
clouds, rain, snow, and the disintegration of rocks; 
on movements of air as agents producing wind 
and storms; on the thermometer; on magnets, 
and two of their uses. In chemistry, lessons were 
given on air and its composition ; on combustion 
and its products; on iron rust as to formation, 



IN BOSTON 15 

and effects on iron ; on C0 2 as an ingredient of 
calcite, and a product of breathing ; on acids as 
tests for lime rocks containing C0 2 ; on the dis- 
tinction between physical and chemical changes. 
In astronomy, a few lessons were given on the re- 
lations of sun and earth as causing day and night 
and the seasons. 

Botany was pursued in the fall and spring 
months. In the spring the children planted a 
window garden, from which they drew plants for 
the study of germination and growth. From gar- 
den and wild plants they studied buds and their 
developments, and the forms, parts, and uses of 
some leaves, flowers, and fruits. A series of les- 
sons on plants yielding textile fabrics and the 
manufactures from them was projected ; but, ow- 
ing to the difficulty of getting plants in proper 
condition, the only portion given was that on the 
cotton plants. Fine specimens of these were re- 
ceived from Georgia, which kept fresh nearly two 
weeks, and showed all stages, from flower bud to 
open boll of cotton fibre. No work in zoology 
was done, save the giving of a few lessons on silk- 
worms and sheep, as yielding silk and wool. In 
physiology, lessons were given on the general 
parts of the body ; on the joints, skin, hair, nails, 
and teeth ; on the chest, and the process of breath- 
ing and its products ; on food and digestion — all 
with reference to the care of the body, keeping 
the lungs from disease, and the true object of tak- 
ing food. Geography was connected with science, 
history, and literature — the original habitat and 
migrations of rocks and plants, and the location 



16 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION" 

of events leading to imaginary journeys. The 
forms of water and land, and a demonstration of 
the shape of the earth by the positions and ap- 
pearances of vessels at sea, were gained in lessons 
to the country and the sea-shore. Boston and its 
surrounding townships were studied in connection 
with lessons in local history. Maps, globes, com- 
pass, and modelling clay were used throughout 
the course. 

While the work in mathematics was not so 
fully developed on new lines as in other subjects, 
some work done in the first year may be of in- 
terest to the reader. In a field lesson of the sec- 
ond week, some distinguishing features of the 
apple, beech, pitch and white pine trees were 
noted and branches obtained. These branches 
furnished material for many days' number les- 
sons. Apple leaves with their two stipules, pitch- 
pine sheaths with their three needles, beechnut 
exocarps with their four sections, and white-pine 
sheaths with their five needles were used by the 
children in constructing concrete number tables, 
which — picking up the objects — they recited as 
follows : " In one sheath of white pine are five 
needles ; in two sheaths of white pine are two 
times five needles," etc. When the concrete table 
was familiar, the same number relations were 
written on the blackboard with figures and sym- 
bols. In this manner the children learned the 
four classes of tables as far as sixes. Meanwhile 
the stiuty of geometrical forms and the plant 
lessons gave illustration and review. In Janu- 
ary work with money was begun, and continued 



IN BOSTON 17 

through the remainder of the year ; but other op- 
portunities to give practice in number were util- 
ized — as, the six faces of the halite crystal, the 
six stamens of the tulip, etc. To get unworn coins 
we sent to the Philadelphia Mint. In two lessons 
the children learned the names and values of one 
copper, two nickel, four silver, and six gold pieces; 
in the third, by placing piles of coin side by side, 
they constructed and learned the table : 

Two silver half dollars equal one gold or silver 
dollar. 

Four silver quarter dollars equal one gold or 
silver dollar. 

Ten silver dimes equal one gold or silver dollar. 

Twenty nickel pieces equal one gold or silver 
dollar. 

One hundred copper pennies equal one gold or 
silver dollar. 

On the following day a new concrete table was 
prepared, and the dollar sign, figures, symbols, 
and decimal point were substituted for the words 
in the written work. The relative values to one 
another of the lower denominations were taught, 
and tables constructed and written. The differ- 
ent denominations of paper money up to the fifty- 
dollar bill were added to the coins ; and this 
money — about one hundred and fifty dollars — 
was used in business transactions, which gave re- 
view of the number relations already learned, and 
taught those necessary to the construction and 
comprehension of the remaining tables. At the 
end of eight months the children could use and 
write numbers to one hundred and fifty, and the 

2 



18 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

signs +, — , X, -5-, = >$> and * (decimal point); and 
understood the value of position in notation to 
three places to the left and two to the right of 
a decimal point. Also, in the oral work with 
money, they readily used the fractions one half, 
one fourth, one tenth, one twentieth, and one hun- 
dredth ; and most of them could write from mem- 
ory the usual tables from one to twelve. In this 
first year no effort was made to do a defined kind 
or amount of work ; the children spent from 
twenty to thirty minutes each day at some math- 
ematical work, but progress and variety depended 
on their interest and capacities. A visitor who 
had spent forty years in teaching sat through 
one of these primary sessions. He expressed pleas- 
ure and surprise at the work of the children 
in science, reading, and other branches, but was 
incredulous, at first, about the work in number 
with the money at their desks, and the written 
work in figures and signs at the blackboards. 
He went around among the children, tested them, 
and watched to see if there were not some trick 
of parrot -like performance. Finally, convinced 
of the genuine comprehension of what they were 
doing by these children of six and seven, he said : 
"I should not have believed it on the statement 
of any man or woman whom I have known ; but 
I have seen it with my own eyes." 

It is a matter of regret to me that growing 
burdens of care forbade the development of the 
number work during the second and third years 
on the lines begun in the first year. To spend 
from a half-hour to an hour a day for ten years 



IK BOSTON" 19 

at mathematics, with no better results than the 
average boy or girl of sixteen can show, looks 
like a great waste of time and energy. May not 
the cause be twofold : First, that the beginning 
work is made silly by its simplicity, and insipid 
by being related to nothing interesting; second, 
that processes like the subtraction of large num- 
bers and long division are pressed upon the child 
before his powers are adequate to their compre- 
hension ? 

The last fifteen minutes of each day were de- 
voted to literature. Selections with biography 
and anecdote constituted the materials for these 
lessons. Advantage was taken of birthdays, an- 
niversaries, and natural phenomena. Storms fur- 
nished accompaniments to Lowell's The First 
Snow-fall, portions of Whittier's Snow-bound, 
Longfellow's Rainy Day, Bryant's Rain, Shel- 
ley's Cloud, etc. Flowers brought by the children 
were related to readings from Burns, Wordsworth, 
Emerson, Lowell, Bryant, Whittier, and Long- 
fellow. Emerson's Rhodora was committed to 
memory and recited, a cluster of the purple blos- 
soms being in sight. Selections were made with 
primary reference to their value. Biography was 
usually employed to heighten interest in litera- 
ture ; for its own sake when embodying noble 
sentiments — as Scott's struggle against debt, Sid- 
ney's gift of water to the soldier. By such talcs 
of heroic effort and action it was hoped to develop 
courage, honor, and devotion to duty. 

Aside from clear language in narration, accom- 
panied by pictures of persons and places, and such 



20 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

reading as expresses the rhythm and meaning, no 
effort was made to have biography or selection 
understood. Many children have such an appre- 
ciation of melody that a fine poem well read will 
hold their attention. Just before Christmas, in 
our first year, I read a portion of Milton's Hymn 
on the Nativity, and said, " I hope you will some 
day read the whole, and like it." " Please read it 
all now," said several voices. So it was all read, 
and the children listened intently. Milton's pict- 
ure was put away, and nothing said of him for a 
year. When his picture was again put on the 
easel, a hand was at once raised. "What is it, 
Tracy ?" " I know who that is." " Who ?" " Mr. 
John Milton." "What do you remember about 
him?" "He gave his eyes for liberty" — an ex- 
pression which, so far as my knowledge of the 
child went, he had not heard from any one, but 
was his own terse summing up of the narrative 
he had heard a year before, when barely six years 
old. Most children have such an appreciation of 
justice and heroism that they will even walk more 
erectly after listening to a tale involving these 
qualities. I shall not forget how gravely and 
proudly fifty children withdrew from the school- 
room after listening to the story of Sidney's death. 
An unspoiled child has usually a vivid imagina- 
tion; and it is as pernicious to meddle with the 
formation of his mental pictures in literature, as 
in science lessons to keep telling him what he can 
get from his specimens. The child's mind should 
be brought into direct contact with the realities 
in history and literature, and left to work at 



IN" BOSTON 21 

them with the least possible interference and 
guidance. If a child attempted to repeat a quo- 
tation or fact, accuracy was required, but he was 
not urged to remember. Much in the literature 
lessons w T as above the children's comprehension ; 
but it was thought well for each child to feel a 
breath from the mountains above and beyond — 
a breath whose coolness and fragrance he might 
feel without analysis or comprehension of its qual- 
ities. To have felt was enough. So we paid no 
attention to ordinary poems and tales for little 
children, but introduced the children at once to 
Longfellow and Emerson, Wordsworth and Scott, 
Milton and Shakespeare. 

There was regular study of history for each 
year. Copies of early and late maps of Boston 
were given to each child ; the older one was drawn 
on transparent paper, so as to be laid over the 
later one and show directly the changes and ex- 
tensions into river and harbor. Colored crayon 
maps and pictures were used to illustrate the his- 
torical narrative. These narratives were drawn 
mostly from local events — as the settlement of 
Boston, with certain old Boston worthies as cen- 
tres about whom incidents were grouped; the 
beginning of the Revolutionary War, with a visit 
to the Washington elm at Cambridge ; some in- 
cidents of slavery and the Civil War connected 
with Garrison. Extracts from diaries, letters, 
etc., were printed on leaflets and read by the 
children, who drew their own inferences. These 
readings from original sources were mostly con- 
fined to the third and fourth classes, as the Ian- 



22 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

guage used was too difficult for children of the 
first two years. Sometimes gratifying volunteer 
work was done ; as an instance, a boy of eight 
learned the whole of Paul Revere 's Ride, and 
recited it, standing at the blackboard and tracing 
on a colored map of Boston and its surrounding 
townships the route taken by the rider. This 
work in history was done by Miss Nina Moore — 
Mrs. F. B. Tiffany — who developed it with such 
skill as to fascinate the children and to lead to 
her publications on these topics. (See articles in 
Common-School Education for September, Octo- 
ber, November, and December, 1888 ; and the 
books Pilgrims and Puritans and From Colony 
to Commonwealth.) 

The industrial part of the experiment was start- 
ed at the beginning of the third year. Each child 
was provided with a bench and ten tools — ruler, 
try -square, scratch-awl, saw, vise, plane, chisel, 
brad-awl, hammer, and nail-set. The children of 
the two younger classes made a box with the 
cover hinged on with strips of leather; those of 
the two older, a case with shelves fitting into 
grooves. The work was divided into steps ; each 
was mastered before the next was tried. All the 
children began with the use of the ruler in meas- 
urements to an eighth of an inch. The try-square 
came next. As soon as a true line was drawn, 
the saw was used to divide the board. After the 
first day no two children were exactly together, 
each one's position depending on his own results. 
The third step— the cross-cut saw — detained most 
of the children several weeks ; a true cut with its 



IN BOSTON" 23 

face at right angles to each face of the board was 
required. This the children tested for themselves. 
Often during the first work with saws a child 
would ask, " Will that do i" " Test it," was the 
reply. Reluctantly the child applied the test, 
and renewed his courage as best he could. After 
a time the desire to use a new tool and to get on 
as some other child did gave way to desire for 
perfection. This brings me to the chief end of 
the work — not skill in handicraft or any finished 
products, but to put before the children concrete 
examples of the true and the false, in such a man- 
ner that the child himself should judge his own 
work by some unvarying standard. As an in- 
stance of the moral effects: One of the older 
boys was the first to finish the shelves and both 
sides of his case, all but one groove. The excite- 
ment of this eminence dizzied him, and the groove 
was a failure — being too wide, it left an ugly crack 
above the shelf. No one was more sensitive to 
that ugliness than he ; but the struggle between 
his desire for perfection and the fancied humilia- 
tion of making another side and letting some oth- 
er child be the first to complete a case went on 
for some time. Finally, with a manly effort to 
keep his eyes from overflowing, he laid the faulty 
side among the failures and began again. To 
give up the work of many days, and the prospect 
of coming out ahead, was to win a great battle, 
not for himself alone, but for his comrades. For 
use, the rejected side was almost as good as per- 
fection itself; to ideas of truth and beauty the 
boy's mind yielded obedience. Such yielding of 



24 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

lower motives to higher ones, such discipline of 
patience and judgment as these lessons gave, were 
not reached in any other line of work. 

Most public schools for primary children have 
two sessions a day for ten months ; in the experi- 
ment there was but one session a day for eight 
months. In the former, five hours or more a 
week are spent in reading alone; in the latter, 
less than five hours a week were given to the sci- 
ence lessons and to the reading drawn from them. 
The saving of time in other studies was almost 
equally great; and besides the large bod} T of su- 
perior knowledge opened to the children, the ordi- 
nary proficiency in all subjects commonly taught 
in primary schools was generally reached. This 
demonstrates the fallacy of the current opinion 
that children cannot be taught science, history, 
and literature, and at the same time master the 
usual three R's allotted to them. 

But the experiment aimed to introduce the child 
to the world of real learning, with the idea that 
such introduction would produce certain effects 
on his mind ; and it is by that aim and those 
effects that it should be judged. As to the for- 
mer, the reader has but to examine the body of 
knowledge outlined, and judge whether it is wor- 
thy to be called real learning and the foundation 
of knowledge. 

Among the effects, perhaps the chief place 
should be assigned to the general attitude tow- 
ards study. Compare two children trained in the 
two wa} T s. On entering school both are equally 



IN BOSTON 25 

eager and happy. One is kept for the most part 
away from learning, and laboriously taught to 
hold the empty wrappers of it; the other is 
taken at once into the shrine, where he soon be- 
comes at home ; and, while he gets wrappers as 
rapidly as the child outside, every one is full and 
overflowing. The former grows tired of tasteless 
drudgery and longs to have school days over ; in 
the latter, nearness to the central fires kindles 
the sacred flame, and its shining through the 
fleshly covering makes his face a contrast to that 
of the other child. One finds the school-room a 
prison ; the other an enchanted land where all is 
" truly true." If both leave school during the 
first six years — as so many do — the former is 
likely to have vague notions about a large field 
of study, and but little interest in its contents or 
faith in their value ; while the latter will be as 
likely to preserve sympathy with learning, and 
desire to advance it in himself and others. 
Among other effects may be mentioned : 
1. The children learned to ask serious questions. 
In a lesson on clouds and rain, Emma asked, 
" Why is the rain not salt, if most of the cloud 
vapor comes from the ocean ?" She was told to 
dissolve a certain amount of salt, to evaporate 
the solution over a fire, and note results. On 
the following day she reported that the same 
amount of salt was left after evaporation as she 
had first used, and gave as her conclusion that 
ocean-water in evaporating leaves all its salt be- 
hind ; and the youngest boy added, " Then only 
pure water can float up into the blue sky." 



26 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

2. They learned that opinion without knowl- 
edge is folly. In planting a window garden, 
they put seeds in pots of earth ; I, between wet 
blotting-papers. Their decided opinion was that 
ray seeds would not grow. A week later they 
were eager to give this sentence, " The seeds in 
Miss Alling's garden did grow." 

3. They became fond of mental activity. They 
were not marked, formally examined, hurried, 
nor required to do a certain amount in a definite 
time. This freedom and leisure transformed 
their first laborious, timid thinking into a delight, 
which they entered upon as spontaneously and 
fearlessly as upon their outdoor physical games. 

4. Their habits of thinking improved. At first 
they showed but a superficial interest in the ob- 
jects studied, and much questioning was needed 
to direct and hold their attention ; later, they 
voluntarily seized upon the marked features of 
objects and phenomena, and pursued them until 
practically exhausted. We did not flit hither 
and thither, giving the children new objects of 
study each clay, but kept them at work upon one 
so long as it could yield anything within their 
comprehension. As an instance, successive les- 
sons on the cotton plant were given for three 
weeks. 

5. Their perceptions became almost unerring. 
At the Museum of the Boston Society of Natural 
History, one day, Katherine exclaimed, as we 
rapidly passed a case of minerals, " There's some 
graphite." Turning and seeing whitish speci- 
mens, I said, " Oh no ; have you forgotten how 



IN" BOSTON" 27 

graphite looks?" The child insisted, and we 
turned back to the case. Sure enough, on one 
shelf the white rocks contained grains and threads 
of graphite, which fact the child had gathered in 
one rapid glance. 

6. Memory became active and generally true. 
It was aimed to pursue all things in order, with 
regard to natural relations and associations ; be- 
yond this the cultivation of memory was committed 
to the qualities of the ideas presented. The re- 
sult seemed to prove that memory is retentive in 
proportion to the activity and concentration of 
the whole consciousness, and that this is propor- 
tioned to the interest of the subject-matter. 

7. Imagination was vivid and healthy, produc- 
ing clear reproduction, apt illustration, sometimes 
witty caricature, and occasionally thought and 
expression delicate and lovely enough to be wor- 
thy the envy of grown-up literati. 

8. There was a beginning made in the habits 
of independent examination of any matter, of 
honestly expressing the results of such examina- 
tion, and stoutly maintaining one's own ideas 
until convinced of error, and then of readiness to 
adopt and defend the new, however opposed to 
the old. These habits lead to mental rectitude, 
robustness, and magnanimity, which qualities con- 
fer the power of discriminating values : for pride 
of opinion gives blindness ; the love of truth for 
its own sake, sight. 

9. In waiting for Nature to answer questions — 
sometimes they waited three weeks or more — 
and in continual contact with her regularity and 



28 AN EXPERIMENT IK EDUCATION 

dependence on conditions, they gained their first 
dim conceptions of what law means, and of the 
values of patience and self-control, and of real- 
ities as opposed to shams. Finding in Nature 
mysteries which the wisest have not explained, a 
half-conscious reverence stole upon them — the 
beginnings of true spiritual growth. 

At first the experiment called forth much criti- 
cism. At home the children told about rocks and 
plants, and related stories from history and liter- 
ature, but said little about reading and writing. 
Parents came to see, and universally condemned 
the method. One mother said, " My daughter 
will study geology and literature when the proper 
aoe comes; I wish her now to learn reading and 
writing, and have simple lessons in arithmetic 
and geography." But she yielded to her child's 
entreaties, and allowed her to be experimented 
upon. Later, this mother visited the department 
to express her wonder and satisfaction at her 
daughter's progress in reading, writing, and num- 
ber. A father, after visiting the department, 
said, "My boy isn't learning anything; he's hav- 
ing a twaddle of experiments." Three months 
afterwards he said, " My boy's whole attitude of 
mind is changed ; he looks at the world with new 
eyes, and is also progressing rapidly in the studies 
common to children of his age." 

A criticism frequently met was that the vocab- 
ulary was too difficult, and, being largely scientific 
and technical, could not lit children to read chil- 
dren's books. Experience proved the contrary. 
Eeading for ideas, the children were not deterred 



IK BOSTON 29 

by a few unfamiliar words. In reading stories in 
books, they could usually get the principal ideas ; 
and to infer the meaning of the unknown forms 
had much novelty and interest. It was also ob- 
jected that the ideas themselves were too difficult, 
and could not possibly be comprehended by the 
children. In a language lesson of the second 
year, Frank gave the sentence, " The soil is thin." 
A visitor asked, "Did you ever see a well dug?" 
" Oh yes ; at my grandfather's, last summer." 
"Was the soil there thick or thin?" "Thick." 
"How thick?" Looking from floor to ceiling, 
" Thicker than from this floor to the ceiling." 
" Then what do you mean by saying that the soil 
is thin?" was asked, in a mocking, disconcerting 
tone. Frank dropped his eyes in thought ; after 
a moment he said, " I mean it is thin when you 
think of all the way down to the centre of the 
earth" This boy entered before he was six years 
old, and was at this time barely seven. 

Teachers who visited the department said, 
"You have a comparatively small number of 
children from cultivated families ; even similar 
results could not be obtained in the large, miscel- 
laneous public-school classes." This could be met 
then by the statement only that mind has every- 
where the same elemental possibilities, and must 
yield similar results for the same influences, al- 
though the time required might be much length- 
ened. This criticism has now been answered in 
part by the results of a trial made in the public 
schools at Englewood, 111., an account of which 
is given below. 



30 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

The few scientists who knew of the experiment 
looked on with favor. " It is the ideal way," 
said one: "A realization of my own dreams," 
said another. An eminent leader in educational 
affairs in this country objected that the great ma- 
jority of our primary -school teachers could not 
follow in the same line because lacking the requi- 
site body of knowledge. When courses of study 
for lower schools are made out by eminent spe- 
cialists with a view to putting into the hands of 
children the beginnings of their own lines of 
research, and when school authorities provide 
courses of lectures and other means of furnishing 
to teachers the necessary body of knowledge, I 
think teachers will, as a whole, be quick to re- 
spond to the demand and the opportunity — as a 
release from the belittling effects of their present 
monotonous drudgery with trivial ideas, if for no 
higher motive. 

In conclusion, the reader may wish to ask, 
" AVas the experiment, after all, a success ?" I 
answer, " As a demonstration of the possibility 
and value of introducing little children to real 
learning, yes ; as a realization of my ideals, no." 
I was conscious that there was much that was 
superficial in the work, and that in striving to 
avoid shadows and to grasp the real substance of 
education I often grasped but another and a finer 
sort of shadow. May some other teacher, having 
greater fitness for the work and a longer opportu- 
nity for effort, reach the goal for which I started ! 
The instruction such a one could give about prima- 
ry education is needed all over our beloved land. 



II 

AT ENGLEWOOD* 

Englewood, 111., is now a portion of the city 
of Chicago ; but formerly it was a suburban town 
with an independent school system. In October, 
1SS6, Miss Frances MacChesney, a primary teach- 
er in the Lewis School, obtained permission from 
her principal, Miss Katherine Starr Kellogg, and 
her superintendent, Mr. Orville T. Bright, to try 
some work on the lines wrought out in the exper- 
iment made at Boston. Her request was granted, 
on condition that she would complete the grade 
work in the required time. 

At first nothing was attempted beyond the giv- 
ing of simple science lessons as bases for reading 
lessons. In these the children were furnished 
with specimens, and led through their own ob- 
servations to the acquisition of facts and ideas, 
which the children expressed ; these expressions 
put upon the blackboards constituted the reading 
matter, and were written in script or print on 
slips of paper for further use. At this time Miss 
MacChesney herself thought of the work mainly 

* Reprinted, by permission, from The Popular Science 
Monthly for February, 1892, where it bears the title "An 
Experiment in Education." 



32 AN" EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

as a more interesting way of teaching reading ; 
and, although the basal lessons were usually drawn 
from Nature, little attention was paid to the qual- 
ity and value of the ideas thus used. Later, the 
fundamental idea of the Boston experiment was 
taken up, and the chief attention directed to the 
selection of topics and materials for real science 
lessons. 

In this work no effort was made to introduce 
the vocabulary of the reader assigned to the 
grade. In February that reader — Appletons' 
First — was given to the children for tbfe first 
time. To quote Miss MacChesney's own words : 
" The interest which had been awakened by the 
reading of their own thoughts was transferred to 
the books, and the grade work was completed 
before the required time — thus more than fulfill- 
ing the condition on which the trial was allowed 
to be made." 

The work in reading went on in this manner 
during a second year, all other grade work being- 
done in the old ways. During the third year 
systematic lessons on minerals and plants were 
given and work in literature begun, and the chil- 
dren's sentences were written out on a t}^pewriter. 
In a letter written at the close of this year, Miss 
MacChesney says : " Out of a room of forty chil- 
dren, divided equally into two classes, one class 
finished the first year's work in eight months ; 
the other class, with the exception of two chil- 
dren, completed the grade work at the end of the 
year, besides doing all the extra work ; and the 
Avhole was accomplished with ease and happiness 



AT ENGLEWOOD 33 

on the part of both pupils and teacher." Dur- 
ing the first year of trial, another teacher in the 
Lewis School, Miss Quackenbush, became inter- 
ested in Miss MacChesney's work, and began a 
similar attempt with her own class. In a short 
time she produced excellent results. 

From the first, Mr. Bright carefully watched 
the progress of the trial, and willingly and pa- 
tiently waited its results. When convinced of 
the superiority of the principles involved and of 
the results obtained, he earnestly championed the 
cause, and has continued to be its enthusiastic 
supporter. 

During the second year, teachers' meetings 
were called, discussions aroused, illustrative les- 
sons given, courses of lectures for the teachers 
projected, and other teachers joined in the work. 
A teacher wrote me at the time: "I never saw 
teachers so ready and eager to 'speak in meet- 
ing' ; . . . I never saw them so thoroughly awake/' 
Finally the principals and teachers of the Engle- 
Avood schools generally waked up to the fact that 
something new and interesting was going on in 
their midst; the idea spread, and many visitors 
came from adjoining towns.'" 

* In the fall of 1888 Miss MacChesney gave a series of les- 
sons on grasshoppers and beetles. These the children caught 
for themselves, but she herself killed and preserved them in 
alcohol. The following summer, while teaching at an insti- 
tute, she was attacked quite fiercely for this part of her work, 
on the plea that it was inculcating cruelty. I should like to 
ask all who bring this plea whether they eschew roast beef 
for dinner. Shall a milliou beasts of a high grade of intelli- 
gence and finely wrought nervous systems daily wituess the 



34 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

At the beginning of the fourth year a printing- 
press was provided ; but each teacher furnished 
her own type, set it, and did the printing for her 
class. During this year, after four months of 
the new work, one division of Miss MacChesney's 
class ''completed the grade work in reading in 
three months, a thing never before done at En- 
glewood." Concerning this year Miss MacChes- 
ney says further: "From the experience which 
this year has brought me, I am thoroughly con- 
vinced that, could the average child have from 
the first the results of his own observations put 
in printed form, and enough of phonics to enable 
him to find out new words, the reader could be 
withheld until the latter part of the year, when 
it would be read with relish, and as a book ought 
to be read. . . . The power gained by the children 
to observe closely, to tell clearly and concisely 
what they have observed, and the power of log- 
ical, connected thinking is not confined to their 

scenes in ten thousand slaughter - houses, and themselves be 
the victims of the loathsome indifference to cruelty there prac- 
tised — shall this exist and pass uncondemned, because its re- 
sults are pleasant to the appetite of the body, and the cry of 
cruelty be raised when a few hundred grasshoppers are killed 
for purposes of study ? Is the body of more value than the 
mind, and nourishment more desirable than knowledge ? So 
long as slaughter-houses exist, so long will it seem desirable 
to teach children reverence for animal life by minute personal 
study of the wonder and beauty of organ and function in 
the lower forms. When slaughter-houses have been done away 
with forever, the human mind will find a better way to teach 
zoology. Let the cry of cruelty go forth, but not from those 
whose own flesh is built up from the flesh of their brute 
brethren. 



AT ENGLEWOOD 35 

science and reading, but is felt in all the work of 
the school-room. ... In looking back over the 
time since we began working out this theory, I 
see a constant increase in the power of the classes 
that have been led along this path." 

In regard to the influence of this work upon 
herself, Miss MacChesney, during the third year, 
wrote me : " At night I can hardly wait the morn- 
ing, so eager am I to begin another clay, and see 
how the children will go through the work 
planned for that day." Here she reaches the 
true work of the teacher — to watch and direct 
the growth of the children's minds. From letters 
received from Miss MacChesney during 1889-90 
I cull the following : " I started out to try what 
seemed a theory of doubtful utility to public- 
school children, and found all my work and my 
life enlarged and beautified. ... I am certainly 
happier than I have ever before been in teaching, 
and I know I am doing more for the children 
intrusted to my care. . . . Mr. Bright, in order 
to speak with assurance about these matters, 
visited fifteen city teachers ; and in no case did 
he find the attention of teachers or children di- 
rected to anything but the symbol, and in no 
case were the children further advanced than 
ours where thought and symbol go hand in hand. 
... I did not meet with any opposition in the 
work. The only requirement that I must meet 
was ' the grade work accomplished in the re- 
quired time ' ; and whether I could do that was 
asked over and over again. . . . The greatest 
trouble " (referring to the days before they had a 



36 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

printing-press) " was the lack of printed matter. 
I met no criticism from parents and much praise. 
Especially was this true of the work in literature. 
. . . The criticism oftenest given by visiting 
teachers is on the ' big words,' as they call them." 
Elsewhere, in regard to these " big words," she 
says : "They " (the children) " were proud of their 
new possessions, and lost no opportunity to use 
them, and use them correctly. The so-called ' big 
words,' when they express a definite idea, are re- 
membered with ease, while their humbler sisters 
which express nothing tangible are more readily 
forgotten. . . . We can say emphatically that the 
work can be done in the public schools, and that 
both teachers and pupils are benefited thereby." 

Another Englewood teacher wrote me: "The 
teacher gains an impetus in searching for and 
assimilating real truth to give to the waiting lit- 

Cj CD O 

tie ones. ... I believe the parents of our children 
are becoming awakened, for children tell me of 
searches made at home to answer whys and hows, 
whens and wheres, that have been raised in the 
work at school." 

Miss Walter, critic teacher at the Oswego 
(N. Y.) State Normal School, after a visit to En- 
glewood in February, 1890, wrote me: "It has 
been my good fortune to see within the last week 
some of the best school work I have ever seen. 
. . . It was in the rooms of Miss MacChesney, 
Miss Quackenbush, and others that I saw such 
admirable work. . . . Miss MacChesney is carry- 
ing out in a wise and careful manner an ideal 
line of work." 



AT ENGLEAVOQD 37 

In closing this account of the new work at 
Englewood I cannot do better than to give quo- 
tations from two letters received from Mr. Orville 
T. Bright, the superintendent under whom all this 
experimental work has been done. He says : 

December 15, 1889. — " We are now harder than 
ever at work studying how to make observation 
a living element in our schools. . . . We have 
thirty — yes, forty — teachers now who are thor- 
oughly in earnest in the matter." 

March 9, 1890. — " It is about three years since 
Miss MacChesney began the work. Miss Quack- 
enbush soon followed, and the next year Miss 
Phelps, all in the Lewis School ; . . . and the 
fact was demonstrated beyond a doubt that fifty 
children are no bar to the success of a teacher in 
training little children to observe in subjects per- 
taining to science. 

" All our primary teachers slowly wheeled into 
line. We had numerous meetings and discussions 
on the subject, and every one who tried the work 
was convinced. The stand of the superintendent 
had been misunderstood from the first, but he 
did not think it wise to force matters. He wished 
teachers to undertake the work because they be- 
lieved in it ; and now every first and second 
grade teacher in the district — thirty-five in num- 
ber — are in hearty sympathy, as are almost all of 
the third and fourth grade teachers, about sixty 
in all. Not all, however, are at work. 

" There has been no systematic arrangement of 
material, only so far as individual teachers have 
made it in a small way. Our aim has been to 



38 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

demonstrate the feasibility of doing the work with 
large classes, and to prove the growth of children 
under the training possible. These two things 
we have done ; and we are now at work upon a 
related plan for the several grades. The scheme 
must be a flexible one, and it can be so arranged ; 
but the second grade work must grow out of and 
be an advance upon the first, and so on. We have 
discussed motive first for several weeks. Now we 
are on material ; then will come method. These 
I cannot write about now. We hope to see the 
subject in some kind of shape before the end of 
the school year." 

Do not the results of the trials at Boston and 
Englewood virtually constitute a plea to parents 
and teachers to investigate this matter — not nec- 
essarily to follow, but possibly to get suggestions 
about a better way ; for the contemplation of a 
new thing sincerely conceived sometimes leads to 
the inspiration of a better? 

Pupils in all sorts of schools seem, for the most 
part, unable to distinguish between opinion and 
fact ; their reasoning processes are easily over- 
turned, imperfect, slovenly ; their power to dis- 
criminate values is slight ; and the whole working 
of their minds lacks cohesion, totality, and grada- 
tion. Is not the human mind naturally capable 
of trustworthy action, and is not the lack of such 
action in the average adult due to faulty educa- 
tion ? To see clearly, judge fairly, and will strong- 
\y — are not these the great ends of education? 
Should not a man have as great a consciousness of 



AT ENGLEWOOD 39 

mind and of power to think as he has of hands 
and feet and power to use them ; and should he 
not be as unerring in the right use of the one as of 
the others ? Should not the schools give this con- 
sciousness and power and mental skill, and also 
fill the mind with ideas worth the effort of get- 
ting and retaining ? 

The maxim " Ideas before words," adopted by 
teachers like Professor Louis Agassiz, has produced 
great results in changing the methods of study in 
the natural and physical sciences. This influence 
has extended to other departments in the older 
centres of learning, but the majority of our higher 
schools are yet scarcely touched by it. In these, 
study results in little more than filling the mind 
with words ; and from them students pass into 
life without the taste or ability to examine and es- 
timate facts, and to form independent judgments 
and volitions. 

In primary education the maxim " Ideas before 
words" is repeated with tiresome iteration, but 
seldom is a question raised about the value of the 
ideas taught. Do the charts and books for prima- 
ries express aught that is unfamiliar to children ? 
Rather do they not contend for the merit of ex- 
pressing most completely the commonplaces of 
child-life ? Is there anything worthy to be called 
thinking or capable of arousing interest and emo- 
tion in memorizing combinations of symbols, and 
associating them with familiar and trivial ideas ? 
And let us see what " object-lessons " chiefly deal 
with. Last year, in a normal school of the Em- 
pire State, a teacher of primary methods, proudly 



40 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

claimed by her principal to be the best in the 
State, gave thimbles, scissors, chairs, etc., as suit- 
able subjects for object - lessons, and carefully 
led her pupils through the steps required to de- 
velop in children's minds ideas of the parts and 
the uses of these objects. Is there one child in 
five hundred, at six years of age, ignorant of 
these parts and uses ? Then the so-called devel- 
opment process is a farce, and a waste of time and 
energy. Look over manuals of object-lessons and 
courses of study for primary children : you will 
usually find but few subjects leading the child 
from the beaten path of his daily life into new, 
inviting, and fruitful fields ; and of these, note the 
directions as to what is to be taught. Such di- 
rections often resemble a lesson on a butterfly 
that I heard given by a kindergartner. With a 
single butterfly held in her hand she led the chil- 
dren to speak of its flying in the sunshine, sipping 
food from the flowers, living through the summer, 
and of the beauty of its colors. Not a word was 
said of the three parts of the body, the two pairs 
of wings, the six legs, the antenna?, and the tube 
through which it sips food — all of which and more 
the children could easily have been led to see. 
Doubtless the teacher thought the children had 
had a beautiful lesson ; but had they received 
anything at all? Although city children, they 
spent the summer in the country — they had all 
seen and probably chased several species of butter- 
flies, and possibly some of them knew more than 
their teacher about the habits of butterflies. 
Think of children gathered by fifties in thou- 



AT E^GLEWOOD 41 

sands of school-rooms, spending the first } 7 ears of 
school-life in repeating trivial facts and ideas that 
have been familiar from babyhood; in learning the 
symbols for these ideas, and in counting beans 
and bits of chalk! The five-year-old boy who 
described a kindergarten as " the place where they 
are always pretending to do something and never 
doing it," and the eight-y ear-old girl who, after 
reading the first few paragraphs of some ordinary 
primary reading matter, looked up at her teacher 
and said, u I think these sentences are very silly, 
don't you?' 1 are not alone in preferring the les- 
sons of the street and the field to those of the 
school-room. In such dealing with trite ideas the 
child gets little mental exercise, gets no addition 
to his knowledge save the written and printed 
symbols, gets no increase to his vocabulary, and 
little facility in using it. For these slight gains 
he gives the freshest, best years of life, and ex- 
hausts in weariness of spirit the fountains of in- 
tellectual interest and enthusiasm. 

In the experiment an effort was made to bring 
the child at once into contact with the real sub- 
stance of education. It is this concentration of 
attention upon the subject-matter, not upon the 
method of teaching it ; on the kind of ideas, not 
upon the symbols of ideas, that chiefly differenti- 
ates this experiment from ordinary primary work, 
and makes the use of the word experiment legiti- 
mate. The value of method is heartily conceded, 
but what shall be taught was thought to be of 
more importance. Is it not a law of Nature that 
new and valuable ideas only can arouse inter- 



42 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

est and lead to worthy thoughts? When such 
thoughts exercise the mind, do they not exclude 
the transient and trivial, lead to culture and right 
conduct, and so further the true end of existence 
— the perfectionment of the soul ? 

Do not the showy, the superficial, the transient, 
the seeming, rule the hour? Where do we find 
the heroic dignity that should inhere in man and 
woman? Few pursue truth and righteousness 
for their own sakes regardless of consequences ; 
in few does the love of humanity overcome the 
shrinking from poverty and calumny. Are we 
becoming a nation of cowards and infidels, that 
we can fear nothing but material and intellectual 
discomforts in this one short life ? 

To awaken love for great literature, to arouse 
interest in local history, to develop a habit of ob- 
serving Nature's phenomena — to do these before 
the mind has sunk itself in materialism and the 
love of sensual delights — to do these while the 
child is still so young that mind and heart are 
plastic and responsive, is indelibly to impress the 
idea that these are the legitimate objects of study 
whose pursuit leads, not to learning only, but to 
nobility of mind and to real, satisfying pleasures. 
One cannot know and love the great in the 
world's literature and not be ashamed of mean 
thoughts; one cannot be a student of history with- 
out bringing to bear upon the affairs of our own 
time a greater intelligence than the majority of 
our politicians exhibit ; one cannot habitually ob- 
serve Nature's phenomena without extending that 
habit to the highest and most interesting of her 



AT ENGLEWOOD 43 

creatures — man; and one cannot observe man, 
with any depth of insight, without being pro- 
foundly impressed, not alone by the miseries of 
the very poor and the never-ending drudgery of 
the laboring classes, but by the lack of unselfish 
zeal, heroism, dignity, truth, gentleness, generosity, 
and purity among the well-to-do ; one can hardly 
view the course of Nature and history from re- 
mote ages to the present without seeing through 
all a tendency to completion, order, and beauty 
on an ever-rising plane, like the threads of a spiral ; 
and, seeing this, to desire to be himself in harmony 
with that tendency and a factor in aiding it in his 
own time. 

I put forth no claim to the Boston experiment 
or the Englewood trial as a cure for existing evils; 
but I urge every educator who loves mankind to 
investigate each new departure in education, to 
test any that seems to have good in it, to cease to 
concentrate attention on symbols and shows, and 
to turn thought to such realities as can nourish 
the mind and heart, and be retained as valuable 
furnishings for all the years to come, and to do 
these from the first day in the primary school. 



ipatt m 

IDEAS UNDERLYING THE EXPERIMENT 



These ideas were by no means all appreciated and formu- 
lated when the experiment began nor during its progress. 
Most of them were but vaguely felt after. The one clear 
thing then was that children must be at once introduced to 
real knowledge, be given something worth their efforts, and 
treated as rational, natural human beings who ought not, even 
if they could, be made to greatly care for the symbols and 
shows of learning in the absence of the real substance, nor 
led to imagine that they were being mentally and morally 
nourished — that is, educated— when fed on chail mainly. 



48 AN EXPERIMENT IN" EDUCATION 

approximately unerring for each unspoiled child, 
at any stage of growth. 

Variations in these attractions and repulsions 
would arise between different children, and in the 
same child under varying conditions of circum- 
stance and age ; but if the right sort of mental 
environment and nourishment could be hit upon, 
these variations must be sufficiently slight to al- 
low of uniting a small number of children in one 
group for school work ; and ultimately, after many 
and varied experiments, certain general laws 
about mental growth ought to be determined, the 
application of which would allow due weight and 
play to these normal variations. 

This theory presupposes, not only natural at- 
tractions and repulsions, but that the qualities of 
these at any given age are what may be called 
normal ; and by normal is here meant such at- 
tractions and repulsions as by their use would 
preserve and increase the present mental status 
of the individual and the race. 

If such a condition exists as a fact in human 
psychical life, it has existed in past ages ; and, 
despite of conditions adverse to its best preserva- 
tion and development, may be supposed, in the 
long-run, to have had its way with the race ; so 
that the present mental status and condition are 
as normal as the present physical status and con- 
dition are. In childhood, under the best human 
conditions, the latter is certainly charming, and 
its natural tendencies are approximately trust- 
worthy ; and it is here assumed that the former 
is equally so. 



QUALITY OF STUDIES 49 

According to this theory, whatever is worth re- 
taining would be retained firmly, subject to in- 
stant use, and ejected or lost only when its owner 
had no immediate further use for it. This is not 
intended to push the physical analogy to ex- 
tremes with reference to limits of time, but to 
leave each child to retain what he will and so 
long as he will, be it a day or a lifetime ; and to 
trust his mind at least as much as his physical 
body is trusted, to take, to keep, or to refuse and 
to eject whatsoever and whensoever it pleases. 

In a few months of fetal life a human body 
passes through the stages of its inherited animal 
ancestry, and in the remaining it gets through 
with its inheritance of a savage human ancestry ; 
so that at birth a child who is born in an average 
American family is no more a savage than a tad- 
pole. 

It is not intended to discuss here the facts of 
evolution and heredity, or to express belief or 
disbelief in a human genealogical tree which is a 
continuous development, w T hose missing parts will 
yet be restored by science, or a tree whose bole 
is an assumed life process which has not yet had 
physical expression, and whose branches each 
represent some specialized expression of that life, 
but which have no organic, causal connection 
from branch to branch, save in that unknown, un- 
expressed central core or bole. With these ques- 
tions this book has nothing to do; but what it de- 
sires to insist upon is that, granted the main facts 
of heredity as generally stated and accepted to 
be true, at birth a child has presumably passed 



50 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

as many hereditary mental mile-stones as it has 
physical ones. 

Two years after birth a child begins to eat of 
the physical food which his parents eat, and to 
ask questions which his parents cannot answer ; 
and thereafter an exclusive diet of pap is as ridic- 
ulous and as harmful to his mind as to his body. 

But physical pap is luxurious nourishment com- 
pared to the mental diet which is daily served in 
thousands of school-rooms to children not two 
but six years of age ; for pap is made of the finest, 
most nutritious portion of some grain and of milk, 
the most Universally nutritious of all foods ; while 
husks and not kernels, expressions and not ideas — 
the poorest and simplest symbols of knowledge — 
constitute the chief elements of the daily mental 
food of children in the average school-room. 

That kind and quality of physical food which 
are most wholesome for an adult are also most 
wholesome for a child of school age ; and it is 
here assumed that the kind of mental interest 
and activity which most conduces to the health- 
ful satisfaction of an adult mental life will best 
conduce to a child's mental happiness and normal 
mental growth. 

Excluding a few specialists, unspoiled adults do 
not select fairy tales, myths, goody-goody or sen- 
sational stories, nor silly and meaningless rhymes 
for their exclusive daily mental nourishment. 
What a man of average mental cultivation would 
choose for entertainment in hours of relaxation 
from business — that book or occupation with 
which he would fill these hours, provided that 



QUALITY OF STUDIES 51 

from all books and all occupations he could choose 
— that is equally good for the child at his knee. 
The child could not take so much of that book 
or occupation as the father ; but the differences 
would be of quantity mainly, not usually of 
quality. 

When freed from necessary cares and allowed 
spontaneous choice, men instinctively turn from 
the details of their necessary occupations and 
from all familiar and forced activities to those 
which are unknown, unfamiliar, and which satisf}^, 
or are supposed to satisfy, some permanent want. 
As fresh food is sought for the body, so are strange 
by-ways of mental life sought for mental rest and 
recuperation ; and the more unlike his daily men- 
tal labors a given by-way is, the more restful it 
is to the man's jaded mind. 

In every child's home environment is that 
which corresponds to a man's regular occupations 
— familiar sights, sounds, and activities, which, for 
a while engrossing, become intolerable ; hence the 
proverbial restlessness of children. Why should 
school life prolong this mental torture ? Yet the 
maxim " Begin with the familiar and childish 
things" has long been the guiding principle for 
the direction of the child's first years at school. 

Eot the familiar, but the new ; not the near, 
but the far ; not the easy, but the difficult ; not 
the symbols and shows of man's superficial exist- 
ence, but the realities and substance of that which 
man preserves from age to age are worthy to be 
offered as the mental diet of a child. 

The fact that a child can frame a question 



52 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

about a topic is presumable evidence that he can 
receive the rational answer which a man learned 
in that topic could give him. Stripped of techni- 
cal expressions, some of the greatest facts and 
ideas admit of being truly embodied in such 
words and illustrations as an average child can 
understand. 

Understanding is not necessarily such a com- 
prehension of all phases and points as admits of 
re-expression in some glib phrase ; and one of the 
greatest tortures inflicted on childhood to-day is 
the forced reproduction or giving back of all 
mental food received. The hour of entrance of a 
child into an average school-room is the hour of 
entrance into mental bondage, of life under an in- 
quisitorial system which gradually stultifies nat- 
ural mental activities and choices. From such a 
school-room the child is turned out at last, after 
a few years more or less, little better than an 
artificial mental machine. Thereafter, in actual 
life, the man laboriously unforms, bit by bit, the 
habits so painfully acquired in school-days ; and 
the average man goes to his grave without know- 
ing what a precious inheritance he had possessed, 
which a well-meaning school regime made him in- 
capable of appreciating or using. 

Who advance the frontiers of learning and 
make use of great libraries? Out of our seventy 
millions, how many are there? Each child is 
born into the inheritance of all there is, and with 
some degree of capacity for improving or increas- 
ing that all ; and } T et few of those who are most 
carefully educated justify by use to themselves or 



QUALITY OF STUDIES 53 

to their fellow-men their right and share in this 
vast inheritance. 

It is not that love of learning is dead, nor that 
specialization has made it impossible for all but 
geniuses to be much more than mental machines 
for the working out of minor details in a very 
small field ; it is because during childhood and 
youth natural, normal mental growth is thwarted, 
and for college and university is reserved near- 
ly all of that portion of our great inheritance in 
which men have or can have any vital, instinctive 
interest. 

Let children and youths be given the best 
which the race has cared to preserve, a little of 
every kind, and a specialist who is such and no 
more, lamentably ignorant of everything outside 
of his chosen field, could no longer exist — he could 
not be produced ; this would in itself be a gain to 
humanity devoutly to be thankful for. The few 
great who survey the whole field, and have re- 
gard for the whole in every advance of their own 
chosen lines, are not here meant, but that army 
of lesser specialists whose mental life always re- 
mains provincial, and who, in consequence, aid in 
still further warping every } T ounger mind with 
which they come in contact. 

This, then, is the fundamental need of educa- 
tion — to give the child from two years old and 
upward, according to his powers, such mental 
pabulum as adults find nourishing and satisfy- 
ing ; and to do this fearlessly, throwing aside all 
notions of what a child can, and what he can- 
not, comprehend ; and to trust the child's own 



54 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

inherent mental life to take, to keep, or to reject 
and eject what is offered. 

All natural phenomena are presumably under 
law, which is the stable reality in changing 
phenomena. When such a stable reality for the 
varied processes of education has been discovered, 
on and through it can be created such system and 
order in school life as have not yet been known ; 
for either it must be presumed that torture is the 
normal stimulus to mental growth, or that such a 
stable reality when found will make mental activ- 
ity as natural and spontaneous a delight from cra- 
dle to grave as physical activities now are, and 
this to all people. 

And when the natural, normal integrity of a 
healthy, vigorous mental life is restored, not to 
childhood where it perpetually recurs, but to 
youth and manhood through its preservation from 
childhood, the social questions which baffle the 
statesmen and make the interior moral misery of 
the earnest man will, by virtue of that integrity, 
find natural and wise solution, not in forced but 
in spontaneous reforms. 



II 

ORDER OF STUDIES 

To the average adult it is the content of knowl- 
edge, and not its forms or modes of expression, 
that is of chief importance, either for practical use 
or for entertainment. The forms of expression 
per se, in which knowledge has been handed from 
age to age are, with few exceptions, studies for 
specialists only, for grammarians and philologists ; 
to most other students of these forms their study 
is a drudgery to be gone through with for the 
purpose of getting at the contents locked up in 
the forms. 

This may be due to the fact that most teaching 
of languages in schools and in private classes is 
either superficial or vicious in being divorced from 
the true end of language — viz., to be a symbol of 
thought. This is not the place to discuss this 
matter; and what is desired here is to point out 
that, under existing conditions, language as lan- 
guage merely, a system of symbolic forms, is not 
for the average person a subject of study or of 
special interest. For the purposes of this chap- 
ter, then, it may temporarily be excluded from the 
child's curriculum. 

Mathematics also have little interest to the 



56 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

average adult beyond the necessities of business 
transactions. Beyond the requirements of daily 
intercourse with his fellow-man, mathematics are 
dropped almost completely from consciousness ; 
and forced attention to them would be regarded 
by the average adult as even more irksome and 
useless than forced attention to languages. 

By the average adult, languages and mathe- 
matics are regarded, not as knowledge or content 
of learning, but as its tools merely. To an arti- 
san tools are indispensable; but no condemnation 
would be considered too severe to pass upon that 
artisan who should almost exclusively keep an 
apprentice for ten years looking at and arranging 
in varied combinations the tools of his trade. All 
children are apprentices to the art of living; par- 
ents and teachers are the artisans who are sup- 
posed to train them for this art, and it seems not 
unreasonable to ask that tools shall be given no 
faster than a child can begin to make intelligent 
use of them. 

This discussion has been pursued far enough if 
the reader understands that what is desired here 
is to express the idea that instruments of expres- 
sion as such should not be presented to a child as 
its object of attention ; but rather some fact of 
knowledge, some content of experience, to get 
which or to communicate which he must use an 
instrument. 

The primary instruments which are used by 
child and adult alike to get at knowledge are the 
physical and mental powers; and forms of ex- 
pression are but secondary instruments, interme- 



ORDEIl OF STUDIES 57 

diate symbols which serve as links between man 
and his fellow-man. The symbols are of no value 
save when filled with content; and the association 
of a given symbol with its best, usual content, 
and the arrangement of symbols when filled so 
as to convey the greatest possible amount of con- 
tent in the most agreeable way, are the only 
uses, and the highest, fullest uses, which these sym- 
bols can have to all but the students of their ori- 
gin, past uses, and development. 

Reading, writing, composition, grammar, and 
rhetoric must share the fate of that which in- 
cludes them — become the incidentals and not the 
objects of study in a child's curriculum ; and all 
number, arithmetic, geometry, and algebra must 
also be excluded unless some better way than 
the manipulations of numbers and forms, as 
numbers and forms, can be found, even for the 
youngest child. Drawing, as an object of study 
pursued for its own sake, is open to the same 
objection, since in essential nature it is a mode of 
expression, a form of language, and does not rise 
to the dignity of anything more, save in the hands 
of a few great artists. To make the subjects 
named objects of study is to specialize, and spe- 
cialization is usually reserved for the colleges. 

The content of knowledge, for the purposes of 
this book, may be roughly classified under two 
heads — nature, or the physical universe, including 
man's body ; and man, or the psychic universe, 
which is known to man in himself and his fellow- 
man. It is not intended to base this classifica- 
tion upon any distinction between body and mind 



58 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

per se, but to use the average man's thought 
that the external world, including his own body, 
is not himself; and that his fellow-man, like him- 
self, has a realm in consciousness which, at pres- 
sent at least, he docs not regard as physical — to 
use these ordinary common -sense notions as a 
basis for a convenient classification. 

Under this classification, nature will include the 
physical and biological sciences ; and man, the his- 
torical and social. These might be further ex- 
plained by being included under physical phe- 
nomena and psychical phenomena, which together 
make up the content of each individual conscious- 
ness, and of all knowledge to which man has ac- 
cess. All the conditions of life and all objects of 
thoim'ht are referred to one or the other of these 
realms, by the adult consciously, and by the child 
unconsciously. 

Whatever bo the reality in the relations be- 
tween mind and body, in the present stage of 
man's development, it seems desirable that he 
should distinguish clearly between them as two 
sets or series of realities which should neither be 
confused nor mistaken the one for the other. 

If this distinction is to be valid to the adult, it 
must be made valid to the child ; for that con- 
fusion which becomes a habit in childhood will 
probably never be wholly eradicated. 

And this constitutes what seems to me an ade- 
quate reason for excluding myths, fairy tales, and 
liction from a child's mental pabulum until the 
distinction between physical phenomena and psy- 
chical phenomena is clearly established in his 



ORDER OF STUDIES 59 

mind. To live largely in a dream-world peopled 
by fancies is neither natural nor rational ; and 
they who insist on making such a world for a 
child on the plea of leading it through the early 
experiences of the race, do what those early expe- 
riences never did, and make for the child a world 
which has no counterpart in any historic time. 

Myths, at their germination and growth, were 
to the peoples who produced them the most ulti- 
mate, sacred realities ; and at first, being pre- 
sumably objective, physical facts, they in course 
of time came to have a psychic, symbolic exist- 
ence which was disassociated from those physical 
objects which were the germ of their being. It 
has always been true, and still is, that ordinarily 
when myth or story has been completely disasso- 
ciated from physical content men have had no 
further use for it save as a curiosity of what men 
are then pleased to call a cruder, more rudimen- 
tary phase of development. 

Could a parent or teacher be found who would 
in good faith teach myths and folk-tales as reali- 
ties now, that parent or teacher would be entitled 
to teach them ; but this would imply the posses- 
sion of a mental content which most men would 
despise. The claim that courtesy, kindness, and 
certain moral precepts can best be inculcated 
through such tales is a claim that object-lessons 
in the virtues cannot be found in the child's pres- 
ent and actual social environment ; and that the 
moral experiences of the present age are inferi- 
or to those of past ages ; and indirectly it con- 
fesses that the present social and moral stimuli 



60 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

which can be brought to bear upon a child's de- 
velopment are inadequate. This arraigns the 
whole social and moral structure of our civiliza- 
tion. 

In reply to this it may be said, with the old 
Greek lleraclitus, that good comes to conscious- 
ness as <rood only when seen beside an evil which 
is its negation. However evil our civilization is, 
the consciousness that it is evil or inadequate at 
any point is the fundamental step towards the 
doing away of the evil ; and, furthermore, the en- 
vironments of to-day afford opportunities for the 
inculcation of all the virtues which can be under- 
stood or practised. 

Confusion between thinking and doing, be- 
tween the physical and the psychical, is nowhere 
more widespread and pitiful than in just this di- 
rection of the moral virtues. To hold certain 
ethical standards as ideally true and approxi- 
mately perfect, and daily to commit and approve 
acts which, according to those standards, are moral 
atrocities, is no uncommon experience of even the 
best people. Either some ethical ideals which 
man has cherished for centuries are inherently 
false as human ideals or have been misunderstood; 
in which case they should be openly rejected or 
explicitly stated in terms which cannot be misun- 
derstood, or ways of avoiding the present confu- 
sion should be devised. 

It is not meant, in the above paragraph, that 
man has or should have no ideals which are unat- 
tainable in his day and environment. As soon as 
attained, an ideal ceases to be ideal and becomes 



ORDER OF STUDIES Gl 

actual; and the ideal, as such, is continually re- 
ceding — because continually transformed— from 
even the most ardent seeker; but to hold ideals 
which reason and common-sense declare to be un- 
attainable, because incompatible with the sup- 
posed trend of human development, is to divorce 
the ideal world from the actual, and so to remove 
the ideal from the realm of conduct to that of 
mere sentiment. 

It may be objected that this divorce of conduct 
and thought is proof of clear distinction between 
the physical and the psychical. As immediate 
fact it may be ; but that it is an outcome of a 
former confusion, a reaction against a dream-world 
which could not be made real, is probable. Hav- 
ing possessed a dream-world which was once real, 
and found the actual world of life so different that 
dream -realizations Avere impossible, the person 
consciously or unconsciously settles down to the 
acceptance as final of what he has been so rudely 
taught — that ideals and realities are far apart. 

A distinction betw r een ideals and realities is not 
what is here meant by a distinction between a 
physical phenomenon and a psychical phenome- 
non. Metaphysical or technical psychological dis- 
cussions are foreign to the purposes of this book ; 
and yet an effort must be made to make this dis- 
tinction clear, not exactly nor scientifically, but 
sufficiently for the purpose of conveying the mean- 
ing here intended. 

A physical phenomenon is one which has actual 
existence in an external world, including man's 
own body, and which, as a fact, is capable of be- 



C2 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

ing verified by other men. A psychical phenom- 
enon is a fact which has existence in consciousness 
only, and may not be verified by other men. One 
man may find that his psychic content is like some 
other man's psychic content, bat no verification 
is at present possible. All verification is through 
physical channels, and is, therefore, a physical 
verification of physical processes, and not psy- 
chical at all. 

In psychical content mankind demands that a 
sharp distinction shall be made between what cor- 
responds to physical phenomena and what does 
not. All that which corresponds to physical 
phenomena in having or having had its counter- 
part and source in that world of physical exist- 
ence is called real, and worthy of credence ; and 
all else is called unreal, and relegated to the 
realms of illusion, hallucination, and fancy. Then 
from the present point of view of average cult- 
ure a clear distinction between a physical fact 
and a psychical fact is essential to a distinction 
between valuable and worthless psychical facts. 

The world asks to-day of a man, not what he 
thinks, but what he knows ; and rejects his know- 
ing unless it has its basis in a doing which other 
men repeat and verify. This is thought to be 
true of the average state of our American life 
to-day ; and it is into this average state that our 
children are born, and for which education ought 
primarily to fit them. This requires that a child's 
thinking be grounded in doing, and that his psy- 
chical world be built up from contact with wor- 
thy physical realities. 



OKDER OF STUDIES 63 

All physical realities are, in last philosophical 
analysis, expression of psj^chical realities ; but the 
process by which a given individual's psychical 
world is built up suggests that, whatever may be 
the actual story of evolution, the true genesis of 
either physical or psychical fact, the physical 
precedes the psychical as its immediate stimulus 
in the human being of to-day. If this be true, 
physical phenomena are not only those which are 
of the most immediate concern and interest to a 
child, but the only point for a rational beginning 
in the process of education. Certain elementary 
physical facts are the foundations of the content 
of most phases of learning, and with these study 
should begin. An adult who is totally ignorant 
of a subject is not set to learning it, indifferently, 
at any point, but at the point of simplest, most 
elementary — that is, most fundamental — phenom- 
ena ; and the same rule would apply equally to 
the child. 

The simplest elementary phenomenon or series 
of phenoiriena on which a given subject is based 
are always inclusive — are some sort of a whole. It 
is a fundamental fact in consciousness that sensa- 
tions and perceptions are units. No matter how 
complex they are in original structure, in them- 
selves they are felt or perceived as units or 
wholes. As the mind is piqued, baffled, and ill 
at ease when a partial view of an object or phe- 
nomenon is had and only a whole view can satis- 
fy, so peeps at facts, unrelated to some known 
whole, produce mental unrest, and finally mental 
ennui and disgust. It is like travelling a road 



64 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

with continual expectation of arriving at some 
resting -point, and never getting there. Mental 
unrest is as pernicious as physical, and to a child 
it is destructive of normal growth. At each step 
a child should have some whole within his grasp 
to which he can relate what details he gets. If 
that given whole can be that which, as boundar} 7 , 
defines the limits, or as centre makes the unifica- 
tion of that special study for all men, so much 
the better for the child. 

One illustration will serve to show what is 
meant. Before teaching a child about varie- 
ties of rock, or characteristics of a given rock, 
he should be led to a conception of rock as dis- 
tinguished from other objects. As soon as this 
conception is assured — most children of six years 
have it sufficiently defined on entering school — 
the child should be led to some conception about 
the size of the earth, and to think of it as a ball 
of rock, with an exceedingly thin cover of soil over 
the rock. Thereafter, when a rock is studied, 
that rock will be thought of as a bit out of the 
superficial mosaic of the great ball; and the 
place in that mosaic whence came the given spec- 
imen under study should be made real to the 
child by proper devices — use of globes, maps, 
pictures, drawings, modellings, and in imaginary 
journeyings. 

This chapter is meant to add to the fundament- 
al basis which was enunciated in the first chapter, 
the following as corollaries : 

The content of knowledge and nut its forms of 
expression should be the objects of study. 



ORDER OF STUDIES 65 

Of this content, that which has embodiment in 
physical reality should take precedence of that 
which has ps3 r chical existence only. 

This content should at first be presented in cer- 
tain great inclusive wholes,, to furnish the proper 
bases for the true co-ordinations and associations 
of details. 



Ill 

EFFECTS OF STUDIES 

That to which an individual habitually gives 
attention makes up the major part of his con- 
sciousness and largely determines his conduct. 
This realm of habitual attention is each man's 
world of realities. This much is a fairly constant 
quantity, and is separated from the minor portion 
of consciousness by this element of permanence 
and by trust in it as tangible, while the minor 
portion is a fluctuating element, less strongly 
grasped, which may or may not be thought real. 

Some facts in this major portion of individual 
consciousness are the same for all men, some are 
peculiar to men of certain trades and occupations, 
and some are shared by a still smaller number. 

The full content of individual consciousness 
varies from man to man, not in quality only, but 
in quantity ; but that individual content which in 
quality and quantity is presumably great must 
be a very small unit when compared with the full 
content of human consciousness at any given 
point in time. This discrepancy between the full 
content of human consciousness — provided that 
one being could possess and grasp that full con- 
tent — and an average individual content suggests 



EFFECTS OF STUDIES 67 

that some notion as to what ought to be found in 
an individual consciousness is a fair subject for 
educational discussion. 

Either the universe is without order and de- 
sign, or the past growth and present content of 
human consciousness are of vital importance to 
all men. It is a marked feature of individual 
consciousness that it drops from sight unused 
elements, and keeps carefully in view what is 
or seems of use. If there be order and design in 
human development, the is and not the seems is 
the right word to use in the foregoing sentence. 
Granted the is, it follows that what is now in 
human consciousness is there because it has been 
of use. If there be order and design, it follows 
that those elements in consciousness which are 
capable of the most service to the greatest num- 
ber of men whose individual content is relatively 
largest would, in the long-run, yield most service 
to all men. This would imply that a theoretical 
content — made up of the like elements of indi- 
vidual content, of the minds of men who have 
had greatest opportunities — could be mapped and 
made a basis for educational work. 

Also, if there be order and design, the more 
useful elements are those which have been longest 
preserved, and for the use of which nature has 
provided the most elaborate human mechanism. 
So far as science can speak with authority, each 
individual content is limited : first, by the perfec- 
tion or imperfection of the physical body, espe- 
cially of its nervous system and organs of special 
sensation ; and, second, by the amount of skill 



68 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

Avith which this physical mechanism can be used. 
This skill depends, primarily, not so much upon 
use, per se, as upon the methods pursued in use. 
Through the methods of using this physical 
mechanism, each man comes into, or takes, con- 
scious possession of the content of his conscious- 
ness ; and all processes of education are processes 
of building or changing such individual content. 

If the human mechanism play such an impor- 
tant role, an examination of it may do something 
towards giving that theoretical content. An ex- 
amination of the chief courses of study which are 
offered in universities ; of the books which have 
been preserved from age to age ; of the occupa- 
tions of men which most conduce to the enlarge- 
ment of individual content — these taken Avith a 
study of the physical mechanism ought to yield a 
fair approximation to such a theoretical content 
as would be in harmony with the general order 
and design of human progress. 

It is no part of the purposes of this chapter to 
furnish such a theoretical content ; but here, in 
passing to other topics, to point out the need of 
one. The topics under present discussion are the 
facts that the content of an individual conscious- 
ness, whatever be its quality or quantity, consti- 
tutes for its possessor his Avorld of realities, and 
bounds his possibilities of the understanding of, 
and sympathy with, his fellow-man ; and that the 
major part of that content is due to habitual at- 
tention, and hence comes under an educator's re- 
sponsibilities. 

Habits of attention are products of will. What 



EFFECTS OF STUDIES 69 

a child does, he must attend to ; and what he at- 
tends to inevitably calls forth exercises of will. 
Attention itself may or may not be a conscious 
act of will ; but it readily passes into such, and 
always does so when prolonged. Then the major 
part of a man's consciousness — that which he now 
has power to respond to — is a product of the past 
deeds of his body and mind. 

What a child does either through spontaneous 
or acquired acts of will fashions, day by day, that 
which he will be and will have power to do. A 
stimulus to which no past act of attention and 
will has responded will probably find him indif- 
ferent, and may find him insensible. 

That all indifference and insensibility have 
these sources is too much, to claim in the present 
state of psychological science ; but that they may 
be largely traced to such sources is a matter of 
every-day experience. 

Ten men look at a landscape. One sees its com- 
mercial value as a land speculation ; another, its 
agricultural possibilities ; another, its desirability 
as a country retreat ; and another, its sporting 
facilities. To another it is a paragraph in geolog- 
ical history, or the habitat of certain species of 
fauna or flora ; while to an artist, a poet, or a 
philosopher it suggests quite other conceptions. 
The landscape is the same : each man responds to 
its stimuli according to the content of his indi- 
vidual consciousness ; and for each, that to which 
he is not responsive is non-existent, has for him 
no reality. Could one consciousness blend the 
ten into one unified whole, the landscape would 



70 AX EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

be more perfectly seen ; and that one conscious- 
ness would be greater and more serviceable to its 
possessor than any one of the ten. 

Let him who has a comparatively full content 
try to realize the state of one with a meagre con- 
tent, and ask himself if unconsciousness of such 
a dwarfed, rudimentary state is any compensa- 
tion for its possession, or any reason why he 
should be willing that it continue in his fellow- 
man. The wistful look that not infrequently 
comes into the eyes of ignorant men in the pres- 
ence of knowledge, whose presence they dimly 
feel but may not share, is an appeal for possession 
of a larger share of that full content of human 
consciousness to which all are presumable heirs. 

Ignorance of wholes, of great underlying con- 
ceptions, bars a man completely from sympathetic 
association with general fields of study. Given 
the wholes spoken of in Chapter II., their possessor 
may touch with intelligent appreciation men of 
varied occupations and interests; while without 
such wholes, some knowledge of details leaves 
him to endless blunders and such a superficial 
general outlook as repels all who are not equally 
superficial. A man who has a few details only 
continues in a state of illusion about the relative 
amount and value of his knowledge, and often 
fails to comprehend his limitations. 

Largeness of content is not necessarily fulness ; 
fulness implies depth ; and it is depth of content 
which the wholes give. The detachment of idea 
from the special facts of physical detail, and the 
lodgment of it in a law or principle, is what gives 



EFFECTS OF STUDIES 71 

most fulness and meaning to any content. In 
Chapter II. an effort was made to show that edu- 
cational processes should begin with, the largest 
wholes which can be grasped, and that at every 
stage these wholes should precede much detail 
work. 

In so far as the historical genesis of laws is re- 
garded, this order may seem unscientific ; but it 
needs only to be pointed out that a law starts as 
an hypothesis and is proved by detail afterwards ; 
that the hypothesis is framed, not only because 
there are details to be unified, but because some 
mind has been able to grasp and to deal with a 
mass of details as a unified whole; that hypoth- 
esis and laws are the rightful inheritance of all 
who can grasp them and use them as bases for 
thought and conduct ; that the mind naturally 
takes in units with utter disregard of their com- 
plexity; and that to deny a child a psychical 
whole of large dimensions lest it hurt his mind is 
as fundamentally foolish as to deny him a view 
of a whole landscape. 

From the foregoing it may be presumed that 
the major part of that theoretical content which 
should help to guide a teacher's steps would be 
largely made up of such concepts as give the 
main, simple outlines on which, and within which, 
are built and included the most interesting and 
serviceable phases of human learning. 

This view of human need deprecates all schemes 
of education which seek, primarily, practical adap- 
tations to given environments. Such schemes of 
adaptation are certainly necessary ; but the consid- 



72 AN" EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

eration and application of them, from this point of 
view, naturally belong to the age of specializa- 
tion, not to the beginnings of education. 

Granted that some portions of civilized com- 
munities are so unhappily conditioned that such 
so-called practical schemes of education seem nec- 
essary as the beginning and end of education for 
them ; it is not for a moment granted that such a 
reversion to the savage ideal of education should 
be acquiesced in or tolerated as a good thing in 
itself. It should be the aim of the educator to 
assist in annihilating these centres of barbarism 
by claiming for children who are so unhappily 
placed the elements of a liberal education before 
subjection to the yoke of a purely industrial train- 
ing. 

By these elements is not meant a superficial 
smattering of a few details, but that grasp of un- 
derlying concepts without which much learning 
is of the dictionary and scrappy encyclopaedia 
order, and with which a little learning — details 
of such number and quality as to give some grasp 
of wholes — is a liberal education. It is not so 
much the quantity as the quality of mental pos- 
sessions which differentiates the cultivated from 
the uncultivated. 

The content of consciousness, as content, is but 
one half of life ; and habitual attention does as 
much to determine the other half — the applica- 
tion of that content to action — as to furnish the 
content itself. Content and conduct continually 
react upon and reinforce each other, and to the 
teacher one should be as important as the other. 



EFFECTS OF STUDIES 73 

That quality of conduct which is fostered in 
childhood tends to maintain itself in adult life. 
The principles underlying* that quality, or the rea- 
sons for their application to a given case, may not 
enter into the consciousness of the individual, or 
be so vaguely understood that no other account 
of them can be given by him than that a feeling 
of interior necessity forces him to act so and so, 
and by the friends of the person that the given 
conduct is consistent with his character. 

What character is, in ultimate essence or foun- 
dations, this book does not attempt to define ; but 
that, as men realize it in themselves and see it in 
other men, it is largely a result of co-ordinated 
lines of habitual action is probable. "We are deal- 
ing here, not with action as action, but with the 
qualities of action — that which makes many va- 
ried actions alike in intrinsic excellence, as good 
or bad. 

There are two qualities of action that seem to 
be conspicuous and to have stood out as conspicu- 
ous in all times— selfishness and unselfishness. 
Much praise has been bestowed on the latter qual- 
ity, and much blame on the former ; while the 
actual conditions and needs of human society 
have often been overlooked. Those conditions 
seem to demand, and they certainly pay a pre- 
mium on, self-assertion; and, at the same time, 
teachers, secular and religious, and most moral- 
ists have made self-abnegation and self-efface- 
ment the highest ethical virtues. Thus the ideal 
aspiration and the practical necessity are ever at 
war. 



74 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

This war seems to have been accepted as in- 
evitable, a part of the dualism of good and evil 
that cannot be got rid of. Men have already ad- 
vanced to the state of regarding physical war as 
barbaric, and expressive of a rudimentary condi- 
tion. It remains for them to advance to this state 
with reference to the psychical life ; and to see 
that conflict between ideal aspirations and real 
practical necessities is also barbaric and rudimen- 
tary. 

The practical necessities may or may not be 
changed ; but as they are, they can be so exam- 
ined as to give some sort of principle to guide 
one's yielding or resistance to them. The same 
is true of the ideal aspiration ; and it is possible 
to discover some principle which might so adjust 
the relations between the two as to make it a 
balance : so that peace and arbitration could take 
the place of war, and the rudimentary barbaric 
stage pass from an individual private life, as it is 
passing, as a sine qua non, from public life. 

If an inner psychical reality precedes all outer 
physical expression — function being more and 
prior to organ, as scientists are beginning to af- 
firm — it follows that an adjustment of the forces 
within a man must precede such adjustment with- 
out ; and that war will pass completely from pub- 
lic life only as, or after, it shall have passed from 
the inner, private life of individuals. Traced 
back to the individual, it has become a fit subject 
for educational discussion. 

What can save an adult from being torn be- 
tween aspirations and necessities? Nothing but 



EFFECTS OF STUDIES 75 

such a habit of thought and feeling as makes such 
war foreign to his nature. Shall necessity be put 
first, and the child taught to smother what tends 
to its neglect 1 This is the so-called world's way, 
which the majority of men follow and society 
applauds. Shall aspiration be put first, and the 
child made to feel that to lower or to change his 
ideal is ignoble % This is universally taught and 
rarely practised. To so teach a child or youth 
that, as soon as practical life is reached, he must 
either kill his aspirations or be himself killed by 
his necessities is to bring about one of three evils 
— to smother the aspiration or the necessity, or 
live in a state of war. 

If life means anything to a man, its value is 
presumably in proportion to its length, unless 
length be itself conditioned on quality. At least, 
few will quarrel with the notion that the value 
of a life is in proportion to its quality; and that 
the more of a superior quality a given man ex- 
periences, the more valuable he is to himself and 
to society. In this latter sense, value may be 
conditioned on length. 

Prolongation of life is, then, one of the neces- 
sities of an individual ; and as most of the so- 
called necessities minister primarily to prolonga- 
tion, it may be said — bearing in mind what is said 
above about quality — that prolongation includes 
all other necessities. Hereafter, in this chapter, 
necessities will mean the prolongation of a life of 
presumably the best quality possible to its time 
and environment. 

A discussion of the necessities and values of 



70 \N EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

Life will form a purl: of the fourth chapter, and 
for the purposes of this chapter the above as- 
sumptions will be taken as granted. Without 
further discussion, it will be also assumed that in 
the present social slate such prolongation, or the 
satisfaction of the necessities of human existence, 
oannot be maintained by conduct, which follows 
purely altruistic principles; that a man cannot neg- 
lect these necessities without lessening the value 
of Life itself; and, furthermore, that he cannot, 
if he would, set aside ov neglect these necessities 
without committing suicide on some phase of his 
being. 

Then, l\>v war to cease and a balance of peace 
to be maintained between necessity and aspira- 
tion, the latter must change or be differently re- 
garded. To regard a- given aspiration as of no 
value is a self-contradiction: it is no Longer an 
aspirat ion. 

In passing, Let it be pointed out that to be 
taught one thing in youth and to be obliged to 
praotise another in manhood is to beget the habit 
o\' regarding ideals as unattainable, and to be 
responsible for the impotence and Lethargy o\' 
men in the presence o\' national, municipal, social, 
and domestic needs for reform. 

It is to the ideal itself that the question is now 
brought ; and some examination o^ the two chief 
qualities oi' action is the remaining object (^ this 
ohapter. 

Self-mutilation is regarded as evidence of fanat- 
icism or insanity; and conscious, deliberate self- 
mutilation would be regarded with horror by all 



EFFECTS OF STUDIES 77 

right-minded men. This instinctive Peeling has, 
unfortunately, come fully to consciousness with 
reference to the physical life only. That it is 
coming to consciousness with reference to the 
psychical life is evinced by certain educational 
and social eirorts. Compulsory attendance at 
school, libel, and kindred laws are in evidence; 
but as law usually lags some decades behind pub- 
lic opinion, it may be inferred that there is a good 
deal of consciousness about the wrongs of psychi- 
cal starvation and assault. Hut the school law is 
often put on general rather than on individual 
grounds. A child should be educated that he 
may be a law-abiding citizen, worth something to 
the state ; it has not yet come to consciousness 
that a man is worth something to himself. 

When famine sets in and body -starvation is 
conspicuous anywhere on earth, Christendom 
arises and gives alms, while there is compara- 
tively little concern over the fact that psychical 
famine is the chronic condition of two-thirds of 
the human race. When massacres or other phys- 
ical atrocities are committed in some obscure cor- 
ner of the earth, most civilized men rightly con- 
sider it every nation's business to make an elfort 
to put an end to these atrocities; and still, the 
world over, psychical atrocities are so common as 
hardly to excite comment. 

It is individual responsibility that makes na- 
tional responsibility; and only when the indi- 
vidual ceases to be cruel to himself will cruelty 
between men and nations cease. It is this cruelty 
to self, this barbaric self-mutilation on the psychi- 



78 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

cal plane, that seems so desirable to bring to birth 
in consciousness. 

Most psychical mutilation is at present uncon- 
scious because men have not come fully to con- 
sciousness on the psychical plane. It is the es- 
pecial business of education to bring consciousness 
to itself on this psychical plane, and to furnish 
principles and habits to guide its conduct on that 
plane. 

And herein is the most difficult point of this 
discussion — to express the main idea of this part 
of the chapter without an exaggeration that shall 
condemn it. The doctrine of self-sacrifice as com- 
monly taught and understood is pre-eminently 
the doctrine of psychical self-mutilation. 

Upon that child in whom racial instincts are 
strong, the physical life gross, and the psychical 
life comparatively weak and unconscious, the doc- 
trine of self-sacrifice makes but small impression; 
but upon the sensitive, delicate, highly wrought 
product of our finest civilization, it tends to make 
lasting impression, if it make any at all. It is 
these generous, high-minded children who should 
be protected from the abuse of a principle which 
the}^ easily absorb into habit, and which, un- 
checked, often leads to a permanent dwarfing of 
life. 

So far as the span of human vision goes, losses 
are not made good, bread does not return ; and it 
is as foolish to say that to stop the development 
of a capacity will not mutilate the mind as that 
to put out an eye will not mutilate the body. 
Time and opportunity come : he that uses them 



EFFECTS OF STUDIES 79 

reaps the fruits of them ; he that gives them 
away must not only expect to see his neighbor 
reap those fruits, but himself to be permanently 
impoverished by all which that opportunity might 
have yielded to him. 

The relations of the individual to the social 
whole will be touched upon in the next chapter : 
it is his relations to himself that are here under 
discussion ; and the following will now be given 
as fundamental principles of right conduct tow- 
ards one's self : 

My neighbor's right is no more than my right. 
What his right is, let his own capacities and de- 
sires determine. What my right is, let my ca- 
pacities and desires determine. He shall not 
choose for me ; I shall not choose for him. The 
one inviolable limit between us shall be, that he 
shall take nothing from me which I need and 
can rightly use; and I shall take nothing from 
him which he needs and can rightly use. 

If this principle of power to use were inculcat- 
ed in children, and they were forbidden at home 
and in school to give away any sort of opportu- 
nity which they had, or could make for them- 
selves without taking what was already held by 
some one else, a habit of responsibility to self for 
the use of opportunity would bring about a fuller 
development of individual capacity, and so the 
value of life to the individual and to the social 
whole would be increased. 

There are varied ways of using opportunity, 
but an application of the above principle would 
forbid one individual to sacrifice to another any- 



80 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

thing essential for the fullest development of his 
own being, or to accept such a sacrifice from 
another. One may properly sacrifice himself to 
the state or to some social whole; but such sacri- 
fice would ordinarily not come to consciousness in 
youth. Use of opportunity is not abuse of it, nor 
the holding and hoarding of what cannot boused; 
so that the miser of opportunity is as reprehensi- 
ble as the spendthrift of it. The gluttons and 
misers are wholly, and by intention, left out of 
this discussion. 

The chief application, then, which the principle 
of self-sacrifice could have for children would be 
interior and individual — the sacrifice of one class 
of desires to another. In this interior realm the 
principle would hold good until psychology had 
advanced far enough to show how to form such a 
group of balanced desires that a sacrifice of one 
would be a mutilation. This points to an ultimate, 
entire abandonment of the principle as now com- 
monly taught. 

As for the opposite principle — that of selfish- 
ness — this chapter may be thought to be given 
wholly over to its expression; but if that be the 
impression conveyed here, it is hoped that the 
next chapter will correct that impression. 

The ideas thus far presented suggest that the 
war between aspirations and necessities finds its 
ultimate occasion in the holding of pernicious 
ideals; and that the balance so much desired can, 
in the present social state, be achieved and main- 
tained only by adapting the aspirations to the 
necessities, at least during the period of youth. 



EFFECTS OF STUDIES 81 

The purpose of this chapter is intended to be 
as follows : "Whatever choice of studies and meth- 
ods is made for the governance of a child's edu- 
cation, that choice largely determines the content 
of his consciousness and the presumable lines of 
his conduct. 



IV 
ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 

The necessities which were mentioned in the 
last chapter it is the object of this more fully to 
elucidate. To satisfy those necessities nobly is to 
make of living an art ; and in this chapter it is 
proposed to treat of life for its own sake, as an 
art. 

Art is the perfection of the application of 
means to worthy ends ; and means here includes 
human thought and energy, as well as external 
tools and appliances. Living, then, as an art re- 
quires a consciousness of and a capacity for the 
use of means to worthy ends ; and it is that con- 
sciousness and capacity which are the duty of the 
educator to develop and train. 

No man can be conscious of that to which his 
attention has not been directed, nor exercise a 
capacity which he is unconscious of possessing : 
moreover, to be conscious of a thing, and to realize 
that thing as important, are two states ; and it is 
a sense of the values of an experience or an op- 
portunity which should be awakened in a child. 

The ends of life may be said to constitute its 
being, that which it is in itself ; and the applica- 
tion of means to these ends, its expression. Be- 



ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 83 

fore expression, comes that which is expressed ; 
before the means of living, the ends for which we 
live. In the various aspects of man's being are 
found that without which existence, as we know 
it, cannot be maintained ; and the preservation 
and perfecting of those aspects are the necessities, 
in which is the prolongation of life, which were 
mentioned in Chapter II., and which, since life it- 
self depends upon them, may be taken as the fun- 
damentally worthy ends to be pursued in making 
of living an art. To question the worth of these 
ends is to question the worth of life itself. We 
are : and it is here assumed that the fundamental 
necessities of life constitute ends than which none 
worthier can be conceived, or made the objects of 
education. 

Man is, first of all, a physical being, surrounded 
by a physical environment — first of all, not nec- 
essarily because man's being begins in his body, 
but because without the body little is known of 
his being ; and all other aspects during the years 
of man's existence which are known to us are de- 
pendent upon this one. 

For more than twenty centuries man's body 
has been studied, and still imperfection and de- 
bility are common. During all those centuries 
physicians have abounded ; and yet, to-day, there 
are no simple, sure rules for the preservation of 
the body from youth to age. This hoary uncer- 
tainty tends to make one timid, even about theo- 
rizing; yet some attempts in this direction seem 
necessary to this discussion. 

Negative reasons are apt to be neglected ; and 



84 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

it is the negative aspects of man's physical needs 
that are the more frequently emphasized. "Do 
this in order that you may not get ill" usually 
ends in " Do this because you are ill," so quick is 
man to neglect the coming of an evil day until 
that day is upon him. 

To teach a child to pursue certain lines of con- 
duct and of care lest something which he has not 
experienced, and so has no consciousness of, shall 
come to him is to imagine that the order of nature 
can be reversed. Man understands that which 
he has experienced, and very little more ; and it 
is sheer waste to try to filter experience through 
a child's thought. He gets nothing abiding by 
that process ; and what he cannot immediately 
be made to experience in action will make small 
impression upon him. 

Then, to make the preservation and perfecting 
of his body an abiding end in his consciousness, 
he must in some way be made to feel the worth 
of that which does preserve and perfect it. To 
put a child through a course of illness, or to take 
him day by day to hospitals in order to make a 
sufficiently vivid impression of the horrors of ill- 
ness, would be a way of acquainting him with ill- 
ness, and to fill his mind with apprehensions and 
fears ; but it would do nothing towards teaching 
the avoidance of such misfortunes. 

Training similar to this is common in all de- 
partments of life ; and it fosters that negative at- 
titude which makes of existence a series of escapes 
from peril. Fear is not considered an ennobling 
quality ; and, in itself merely, escape from peril is 



EKDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 85 

not supposed to indicate high powers or to be a 
worthy end of effort ; yet children live in this at- 
mosphere of fear and peril from babyhood up, at 
home and in school. 

Let us now turn life around, take it up from 
another side, and see what it will yield about this 
physical aspect of man. 

A child grows. What makes him grow ? Nour- 
ishment, activity, and sleep — the expenditure of 
energy and the replenishing of energy. Replen- 
ishing is not necessary without expenditure ; and 
here is the first lesson to be impressed. He does 
something : he expends energy ; therefore must 
he eat and sleep. This is of external action and 
food. The next step is finer. His heart throbs, 
his blood flows, his chest heaves : day and night, 
waking and sleeping, something within him 
works; and that worker must have supplies of 
energy. Then show him the replenishing which 
is always going on, and lead him from that fact 
to infer its importance. 

Do not expatiate on the impurities of indoor 
air, nor the evils of tight clothing ; lead him to 
love outdoor air, and to take deep, full respira- 
tions ; and the impurities and clothing may be 
left to his own instincts. 

Later, he should be taught to understand these 
instincts, and to know that his outflowing breath 
is excreta which should be regarded as other ex- 
creta are, and its retention in any room be pro- 
vided against, not because retention will produce 
disease, but because, retention is filth. 

There is a third, more difficult step to which 



86 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

mankind has paid little attention. The human 
skin throws off excreta. Take a child to the 
country and turn him loose in meadows and 
woods with nothing on but a single slip, like the 
simplest Greek tunic. Give the child six months 
of such life, and the common, close-fitting gar- 
ments will produce a sense of intolerable suffoca- 
tion. Also, let the tunic be light-colored. Plants 
will die under black covers and go on thriving 
under white ones ; and it is a fair inference that 
the color of human clothing is fit subject for ex- 
perimentation. 

To know such health and vigor as may fairly 
be said to constitute a worthy end of life, the 
child must possess them, and for so long a period 
as to have them so identified with self that devia- 
tions will show themselves in consciousness and 
be remedied at once. If well taught in child- 
hood, these remedies would be sought in an ex- 
amination and readjustment of the fundamental 
phenomena of the physical life — the expenditure 
of energy, the excretion of waste products, and 
the replenishment of energy. 

Most children grow up so acquainted with, and 
educated into, tolerance of small ailments that 
these are unnoticed until their cumulative effects 
have produced serious acute diseases, or chronic, 
organic lesions. The opposite is here urged : 
training: into such a condition of health and vi^or 
as makes a slight disturbance noticeable, and re- 
moval of cause as instinctive as to withdraw the 
hand from a pin-prick. 

There are two ways of stimulating growth: 



EKDS TO BE SEKVED BY STUDIES 87 

one is by bringing about a realization of some- 
thing to grow to, and the other is by bringing 
about a realization of something to grow away 
from. The former is by power of attraction, 
the latter is by repulsion ; the former is by con- 
sciousness of perfections to be attained, the latter 
by consciousness of ugliness to be avoided. Give 
a child the former and he will be so sensitive to 
the latter as to recoil. What is said of attention 
in Chapter III. has application here. Habitual 
attention determines reality ; and if ugliness of 
all sorts were the most desirable reality, then only 
would the philosophy of training by repulsion be 
justified as an educational factor. 

Would that there were anywhere, in any land, 
a school and environment where, from two to 
eighteen years of age, a child might live without 
seeing a deformed thing, knowing of a sham or 
illusion, or feeling the power of a repulsion ! In- 
completeness is not here meant as deformity, nor 
any steps in the process of normal growth, but 
those malformations of life and character which 
make tolerance of defects in body and mind a 
daily virtue. 

The greatest stimulus to perfection that the 
physical aspect of man's being has, is found in its 
environment. Make a child feel and respond to 
that stimulus. To know nature intimatelv, and 
to be equal to her at every point, has been the 
effort of man for ages. Let a child see this, and 
try to understand where man has succeeded, 
where failed, and why he has failed. 

Let the child begin with the more common phe- 



88 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

nomena — the changes of the weather. To try to 
respond, to react against these as do the birds 
and squirrels, will be a lesson which no child will 
forget. To enjoy a walk against the wind, to 
take delight in whirling snow, to feel the glow 
and tingle of reaction against fierce dry cold, to 
get wet through in a summer rain — these are ex- 
periences which a child should repeat year after 
year, until he feels himself more than equal to 
anything which nature offers for his strength to 
overcome. 

Such experiences as these the city child can 
have ; but the country child has, besides, forest 
depths to penetrate, mountains to climb, rocky 
caverns to explore, streams to follow from source 
to mouth, and many other advantages. When 
means of transportation are sufficiently great and 
cheap, it is to be hoped man will return to ways 
more wholesome for children — live in villages, 
and let cities dwindle to mere distributing sta- 
tions of a nation's products. 

The intellectual aspect of man's being consti- 
tutes an object whose preservation and perfec- 
tion are a second worthy end in the art of living". 

The dawn of self-consciousness in a child may 
be considered the birth-hour of this intellectual 
aspect. From that hour he has an intellectual 
life as truly as he has a physical. The adult con- 
sciousness vibrates between a general conscious- 
ness which is diffused over many objects or is 
absorbed in an action, and a consciousness of self 
as something apart from those objects and actions. 
This vibration is the basis of all thought ; and so 



ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 89 

soon as self stands in consciousness as something 
apart, a self to which the "my" consciousness 
belongs, thought begins ; and every process of 
identification of an object as a not-me or of an 
action as " my " action is a process of thought. 

How early these thought processes begin is 
not known, but probably Avithin the first year. 
Whether a child ever has a diffused consciousness 
which makes no distinction between self and not- 
self is a question for the psychologist ; it is here 
desired to point out only that the intellectual life 
as such begins very early. 

Analogies may be faulty and misleading ; yet 
to the writer there seems no better way of treat- 
ing this intellectual life than by pointing out cer- 
tain analogies to the physical life, which are 
plainly shown in adult years, and may be pre- 
sumed to hold equally good in childhood. 

All people who have had much intellectual ex- 
perience know what intellectual hunger is, and 
that it is as imperative a craving as is physical 
hunger ; also, such people do not often mistake 
intellectual activity for intellectual nourishment. 

The expenditure of energy in, or by, the phys- 
ical body is not replenishment, but exhaustion, of 
energy. Expenditure aids growth, because by 
the process of destruction it makes demand for 
the processes of construction ; and if the supplies 
for reconstruction are at hand, the recuperative 
processes go on rapidly — the body is renewed and 
enlarged : yet those processes of destruction are 
but one half of the whole vitalizing process of 
life; the other half is the upbuilding, reconstruc- 



90 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

tive processes which require the ingestion of new 
material. 

Comparing the mind to the body, it may be 
said that intellectual activity alone is no more 
intellectual nourishment than physical activity is 
physical nourishment; and that activity without 
nourishment, or an inadequate amount, will pro- 
duce similar effects in these two aspects of being. 

It will now be assumed that the fundamental 
processes of the physical aspect of being have 
their counterpart in the intellectual aspect — ex- 
penditure of energy, excretion of waste, ingestion 
of new material, and processes of construction. 
These four make two groups — the destructive, 
eliminating group, and the intaking, constructive 
group. Perfection in the physical life depends 
upon the adjustment of these two opposed groups 
of processes ; and it is assumed that perfection in 
the intellectual life is found in the adjustment of 
a similar balance. 

To keep a child sufficiently active, so that the 
destructive forces may keep up a continual activ- 
ity of the constructive forces in his hody, he is 
provided with various stimuli to activity in the 
shape of objects to manipulate, places to go to, 
etc. These may be called the means or tools of 
his activity ; and if they are wisely chosen, they 
may serve to train physical powers to such skill 
and care as will be needed in later years. But 
these appliances to activity serve the destructive 
forces directly, and only indirectly the construc- 
tive ; they can in no wise take the place of food. 

In like manner there are tools to the intellectual 



ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 91 

life, stimulating to activity, necessary to certain 
processes, but no more capable of serving directly 
the constructive intellectual processes than are a 
child's playthings or an artisan's tools capable of 
taking the place of a physical dinner. 

Reading, writing, arithmetic, drawing, as com- 
monly taught and used, are tools pure and simple. 
To adult non-specialists languages, mathematics, 
drawing, and much material in all studies are no 
more than tools. That subject or that phase of 
detail of a subject which to the average adult is 
but a tool should be so regarded in the arrange- 
ment of educational matter and methods for chil- 
dren. 

A well-trained artisan gives tools to his appren- 
tice or pupil so fast only as a beginning can be 
made in their appropriate use : so should the tools 
of the intellectual life be given out with discretion. 

It is fair to ask, If so much of the common 
studies are but stimuli to activity and not nour- 
ishment, whence is the intellectual life to be nour- 
ished in childhood ? An answer to this question 
has been given in preceding chapters : that which 
nourishes the adult will nourish the child. 

Let us return to the physical analogy. Food 
is taken into the body; it is felt as going in, the 
taking is a pleasure, and is followed by a feeling 
of satisfaction. In the body this food is worked 
over, selections are made, desirable portions are 
worked up into integral parts of the physical tis- 
sues, and all else is excreted. 

Such processes as these take place in the mind 
of every scholar. The child has not the scholar's 



92 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

power of selection ; but often a stronger, more 
healthy, excretory power. If children were al- 
lowed to forget, if their minds were trusted to 
excrete useless material as their bodies are, this 
process alone would soon demonstrate what is 
nourishing and what is not ; and what tool the 
child is prepared to use and what not. In the 
writer's experience with children, no intellectual 
tool which the child was ready for and had used 
in legitimate connection with what was not mere 
tools was forgotten, either in itself or in its uses. 
And here a distinction should be made between 
tools as tools and tools in use. No tool is of 
value save in its application to some labor; and 
tools looked at or handled without such applica- 
tion are the mere shows of an idle hour. 

This brings us to another consideration which 
the writer deems vital in the education of children. 
To no child, even the youngest, should ever be 
given a mere plaything, either physical or intel- 
lectual — an object or story which has not its coun- 
terpart and use in adult life. The child should 
have the adult world in miniature — he should not 
have a different world ; his playthings should be 
steps in some skill which is of use in the markets 
of men, and he should be taught to so handle 
and use his playthings as to acquire that skill. 
Playthings and plays should be direct preparation 
for practical life. An unspoiled child is always 
more interested in real grown-up things than in 
shams and makeshifts; and what his interest im- 
pulsively chooses, that he should have, provided 
that he has had a fairly large, well-stocked field 



ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 93 

of choice. It is the educator's business to provide 
such a field, and to guide the impulsive choices, 
not by inhibitions, but by appeal to new attrac- 
tions. 

There is a limited range of living physical ob- 
jects that are fit for human food; other objects 
and phenomena are either useless now or are 
means of external activities. Without desiring 
to push the analogy too far, the same may be said 
of intellectual objects — the vast majority are 
means of activity, and not food. There are intel- 
lectual structures that are dead, and from them 
life can no more flow than can a fossil tree bear 
fruit. The physical life rests upon to-day; it 
were better if the intellectual did also. In the 
knowledge, the thought, the vital, moving, intel- 
lectual life of our day and time is the best mental 
pabulum for our children. 

A thing is not dead because it has lived in the 
past. There are intellectual trees which have 
borne fruit for centuries, and the seeker of to- 
day finds them still alive and their fruit nourish- 
ing. It is the dead and fallen that should be al- 
lowed to decay and pass from intellectual sight. 

What was said earlier in this chapter about the 
positive and negative means of development ap- 
plies here also. That child who is nourished on 
real science and good literature will have finely 
discriminating intellectual sensibilities and a strong 
intellectual life, and will instinctively avoid in- 
tellectual trash. 

Also is there this great similarity between in- 
tellectual nourishment and physical : that which 



M AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

is good may be selected and stored until such 
time as it can be used ; so that which is given to 
the child to-day and which may apparently re- 
main forgotten for years may not be excreted, 
but saved until the clay of its need. The in- 
tellectual activity required to memorize a jingle 
from Mother Goose may be as great as for a fine 
passage from Shakespeare. The former is a use- 
less bit of husk ; the latter, an everlasting suste- 
nance. 

If nervo-muscular arcs, brain paths, and grooves 
of habit mean anything, they condemn as imbecile 
the education which occupies the child's mind 
with what is avowedly trivial and transient, but 
which these arcs, paths, and grooves make per- 
manent qualities of the intellectual life. 

Every child is born into some social environ- 
ment, and is therefore a member of some social 
whole. A recognition of this fact, an under- 
standing of what it involves of personal right and 
of personal service, a feeling of what social life is, 
and what social ostracism or social suicide means 
to the individual and to the social whole — these 
are necessary to an intelligent preservation of, 
and effort to perfect, the social aspect of being as 
an end of human existence. 

In a child this social aspect may, perhaps, best 
be brought to consciousness hy a comparison of 
his social whole to his own body. The foot sup- 
ports him and does his walking, the hand brings 
and carries, the heart pumps the blood. Each 
part which the child can feel or voluntarily move 
has some use, does some labor which he, as a 



ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 95 

whole, needs for his well-being. From these parts 
to the microscopic cell is an easy step for a child's 
imagination, provided that the step be properly 
prepared for by instruction and illustration, with 
the microscope, of what cells are and of their re- 
lations to the tissues and organs. A comprehen- 
sion of the cell as the unit of the organism, of its 
individual labors, and of these as making up the 
various organs that themselves compose the body 
— this can be given comparatively early. 

The child might then be led to see that a cell 
which did not take care of itself — replenish its 
own waste and rebuild its own walls — would be a 
burden to other cells, if for no other reason than 
that it left a weak spot in the chain of continuous 
life and movement ; that one which took care of 
itself only, and refused to make effort with its fel- 
lows for the common good, would likewise inter- 
rupt the continuous life movement and so be a 
weakness. 

If there is no food to be taken, the hands can- 
not rill the mouth and the stomach be provided 
with material to digest ; if the blood is poor, or a 
cell is shut off from contact with its flow, that cell 
cannot take from the blood what is necessary to 
reconstruct its worn self and to make stores of 
energy to be used for the common good. An 
examination of the various parts of the body re- 
veals that everywhere there is an equality of 
health, of sustenance, of physical well - being. 
There are differences as to quantities and quali- 
ties of labor performed, but no difference of indi- 
vidual comfort and apparent content, and no sane 



9G AN" EXPERIMENT IN" EDUCATION" 

person would consciously neglect to preserve that 
equality of individual well-being. 

A series of lessons, about which the above is 
intended as no more than a suggestion, belongs 
to the first topic of this chapter — the physical 
body as an end of being ; but each step in such a 
series is a step in the process of laying a founda- 
tion for the understanding of social relations. 

A man is to his social whole what a cell is to 
his body. By right of being a part of that whole, 
that whole should provide means of physical com- 
fort and well-being ; he should so use those means 
as to keep himself an integral unit, and to be 
provided with stores of energy which he should 
freely give forth whenever the social whole needs 
them. To work with and for his fellows should 
be an instinctive, spontaneous part of his being's 
impulses. 

There is a more vital connection than that of 
labor and responsibility for labor — there is the 
continuous life flow, the continuous disturbing 
and readjusting of the balance between the forces 
of destruction and of construction, a change and 
a movement within and among the parts which 
compose the whole. To make the social whole 
strong and able, to put no limit to the flow of life 
within it, no unnecessary weight on either side of 
the balance — this requires that the individual unit 
feel the social whole as himself. 

Only in the disease of the human body does 
one part take upon itself the labor of another 
part ; so in a healthy social whole, that member 
would be of most value who, developed to fullest 



EN"DS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 97 

capacity, should abide in his own place — presum- 
ably the largest place which he has capacity to 
fill — and there use his energy in the particular 
way for which he is best fitted. 

Equality of physical well-being there should be 
in every social whole, and in humanity as one 
whole ; but equality of labor or of position, of 
association or of environment, of amount and 
quality of possessions, or of capacity to know, to 
do, and to enjoy — these can never be ; and every 
child should be taught to comprehend this great 
fact, and to accept it cheerfully. 

A natural criterion of honor and dishonor in 
labor and position is found in capacity, and by 
capacity here is meant the entire quality of the 
man as a whole. The criterion of honor and dis- 
honor in labor itself is found in its value to the 
social whole. These two criteria — the worth or 
worthlessness to the social whole of a given kind 
of labor, and the relative fitness of a given worker 
to discharge a given labor — these should be in- 
stilled as the chief elements of degradation and of 
honor. To occupy a position which one cannot 
fill, to shrink from taking a place which one can 
best fill — these are equally dishonorable ; for they 
cheat the social whole of its rightful meed of in- 
dividual service. To have a position which is of 
value to the social whole, which uses all of one's 
capacities without exhaustion, and into which one 
fits happily without worry or strife — this is to 
have an honorable position. 

This does not mean that a shoemaker's son 
must follow his father's occupation. The first 



98 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

duty of a youth to himself, and of a state to its 
children, is such individual development as tests 
the presence of inherent capacities and brings 
them forth to conscious use ; and only when this 
is done can an individual's place in the social 
whole be adequately determined, either by his 
own choices or by those of his fellow-men. Such 
development would in time raise the general level 
of capacity ; but it would not therefore leave any 
phase of labor lacking its laborers. It would in- 
crease the skill brought to bear in a given field, 
and so elevate the field itself, until all loathsome 
and unwholesome forms of labor were performed 
by machinery or made less noxious. 

These far-away, Utopian conditions seem not 
impossible of being brought near and made actual, 
through a proper education of youth from child- 
hood up, in this social aspect as an end to be con- 
sciously pursued. 

The next aspect to claim attention will be 
called, for want of a better term, the human as- 
pect. Beyond and including each individual's 
limited social whole is the human whole. To 
serve the human whole indirectly, by aid in per- 
fecting some limited social whole, is possible to 
all; but to serve it directly is possible to few. 
Those who advance knowledge, those who apply 
knowledge to increase the general well-being, 
those who produce masterpieces in literature and 
art, and those whose conduct makes a conspicu- 
ous example which is worthy the emulation of 
men — these are they who serve the human whole. 

The child should be taught to reverence this 



EKDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 99 

human whole, and all who have conspicuously 
served it. To serve it should be no part of his 
expectations ; for he who has best served it has 
done so unconsciously, or by choice of his fellow- 
men or of circumstance, rather than by his own 
choice or will to render such service. To each 
child such an eminence is possible : it is not prob- 
able ; and if it come its recognition is apt to be 
long delayed. Let a child know that something 
which he may do may prove of value to the hu- 
man whole, but that he may not hope to know 
of it in his lifetime ; for many an apparent ser- 
vice time discounts, until in a subsequent age 
nothing is left of it. 

Yet is this human whole the greatest tangible 
aspiration or end of being which a teacher can at 
present give to a youth ; but, for the most part, he 
must be content to feel the human relation — to 
feel the human support and care over himself, 
and to return to the human need his modicum of 
service — these he must be content to receive 
and to give through his limited social environ- 
ment. 

Besides these four aspects — physical, intellect- 
ual, social, and human — there are two more : a 
subhuman and a superhuman. 

By the subhuman aspect is meant that tie of 
descent which binds man to all which in form 
and consciousness is supposed to be below him. 
Each man is bound by a recognized responsibil- 
ity to his immediate human parentage. "Whether 
such a tie of responsibility can rationally be set 
up between man and that lower world in which 



100 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

he is supposed to have bad his genesis, and which 
as a stream of life has flowed down the ages be- 
side him, is a fair question. 

That living stream is here : in it and through 
it man's physical being exists. It is now, not 
once and remotely, but now the immediate, indis- 
pensable purveyor to man's life. What does he 
owe to this purveyor? It is a living thing: 
scholars are beginning to hesitate about denying 
consciousness to the lowest living cell ; and a few 
ask that the supposed gap between the organic 
and the inorganic be closed — because, say these 
few, that gap has existed only in man's imperfect 
thought — and life be granted, and with life con- 
sciousness and an intelligent use of means to 
ends, to the long called dead but really living 
crystal world. 

If this subhuman stream be living, conscious, 
and intelligent — after its kind — should not man 
refrain from wanton ruin, useless death, and sense- 
less cruelties ? May not man take what he needs 
gently, and should he not desire to return to the 
great stream as much as he takes out ; return, not 
for his own sake, nor out of regard to his human 
successors, but from desire to be honest, courteous, 
and helpful to the stream itself, fountain of and 
purveyor to his own existence ? 

It can be imagined that a people whose chil- 
dren from infancy had lived in such an atmos- 
phere of feeling towards this lower living world, 
ami had been educated to regard its well-being 
and happiness as necessary to itself as well as to 
humanity, would, in a single generation, do much 



ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 101 

to change and to renew the natural features of 
our great mother earth. 

Man's relations to this lower world have been 
merely those of slave and master ; between these 
relations he has vibrated. Has the time not come 
when both may be supplanted by that higher re- 
lation of friend, and a child be taught what that 
friendship must mean to himself and to that world? 

If man's life has its genesis in more rudimen- 
tary states, why regard it as a completion? If 
this lower world is its foundation, why regard 
man in this present physical environment as any- 
thing more than the four walls of a single story, 
without even a fixed roof? Has not man in all 
ages aspired to something which he is not, and 
which cannot be realized — at least, has not yet 
been — in the forms, conditions, and environments 
with which we are familiar? Why think other 
environments and conditions impossible? Per- 
haps these exist now and here, but hid by man's 
imperfectly developed senses. Perhaps man's as- 
piration is a reaction on a real stimulus which his 
imperfect consciousness does not quite grasp and 
tangibly locate. 

Of this superhuman aspect of man's being, 
which assumes as essential to the existence of 
such an aspect a superhuman environment to 
which man has relation — of this no account will 
be attempted. Neither will any suggestions be 
framed about this aspect as an end for which 
means must be found and to which applied. That 
such an aspect is, and that some means to its 
preservation and the perfecting of relations to 



102 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

that upper environment whence stimuli come to 
that aspect of man's being — that these are is be- 
lieved by the writer; but in a field where discus- 
sion so easily leads to blind passion or dogmatic 
scorn it is thought best to be silent. It is hoped 
that the time will come when this aspect of man's 
being will be put upon the same basis as are the 
other aspects ; will be subjected by duly qualified 
persons to the same unemotional research ; and 
that the common man will accept the results of 
that research with the same matter-of-course air 
that now characterizes his acceptance of the so- 
called scientific facts. 

Until this aspect of man's being can be regard- 
ed dispassionately it is useless to hope that justice 
will be done it, either by the materialist or the 
religious sentimentalist. The integrity which was 
spoken of in Chapter I. may be relied upon to 
preserve the aspect so long as no direct effort to 
destroy it is made ; and certainly educators have 
a right to protect children against such effort. 
To let that aspect alone seems at present the 
wisest way for the teacher. Also, it is doubtful 
if questions put to children in schools about God, 
angels, devils, etc., can demonstrate the presence 
or absence, the quantity or quality, of such a 
phase of man's being as is here meant by the su- 
perhuman. Answers to such questions show the 
quality of the environment in which the child has 
lived and are an index of the state of adult 
thought in that environment, rather than an ex- 
pression of anything inherent in the nature of the 
child. The superhuman aspect, if it exist, should 



ENDS TO BE SERVED BY STUDIES 103 

be found showing itself, reasonably free from taint 
or artificial form, somewhere along the years of 
childhood, were it not forestalled and spoiled by 
a too early, artificial, and sentimental bias. 

Living as an art, for its own sake, includes the 
preservation and perfecting of these six aspects of 
man's being. For these as ends man lives, con- 
sciously or unconsciously. It may be presumed 
that the more conscious he is of these ends, the 
more perfectly he will adapt to them the means 
which come to his hand. At present the educa- 
tional means of bringing these ends to conscious- 
ness as ends are mostly reserved for the higher 
institutions of learning, and even there they are 
not adequate. 

If they be true fundamental ends of human 
learning, every child, in his measure, has a right 
to them; and the primal duty of education is to 
bring them to consciousness in every child. 

It is no part of the purposes of this chapter to 
state explicitly the means by which this may be 
done — that is, the ends as ends may be known 
and understood by a child ; nor to state by what 
means the man from childhood to age may attain 
these ends — that is, preserve and perfect these 
aspects of being. It is here desired only to point 
out these ends as w r orthy ones, whose pursuit 
makes of living an art, desirable for its own sake ; 
and this being true, that these ends become the 
guiding lines for all educational processes — an aid 
to the determination of all subject-matter to be 
taught, and of all methods to be used in teaching 
that subject - matter. 



part MM 

SOME DETAIL ABOUT THE TEACHING OF 
SPECIAL SUBJECTS 



SCIENCE 

"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? 
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk ?" 

These lines from Emerson's poem "Forbear- 
ance " express the spirit which should guide the 
teaching of science to children. The curiosity 
which demands to "see the wheels go round," 
and that cuts open the doll's body to see what it 
is stuffed with, partakes more of wantonness and 
cruelty than of true investigation. 

If a college student choose to inject hot wax 
into the veins of a living lobster, it is supposed 
that the student knows and accepts the condi- 
tions and consequences of the act ; but such sup- 
position could not be made about the average 
child ; and it seems not too much to say that few 
boys and girls under fourteen years of age should 
be allowed to make experiments which cause suf- 
fering to any sentient thing, or to make prepara- 
tions of living organs or tissues which involve the 
death of the object. 

The mind whose first impulse is to pick or to 
catch, to transplant or to imprison, to pull to 
pieces or to cut open — is barbaric. He who has 



108 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

felt the quick moisture in his eyes at sight of the 
first wild blossom encountered in his spring ram- 
bles, or stopped and remained motionless lest he 
interrupt the song of a bird in some wild spot, 
he and such as he only are iitted by sympathies 
to introduce children into the kingdom of nature. 

Our civilization is certainly barbaric in its wan- 
ton destruction of all the beautiful things which 
nature spontaneously produces. We seem inca- 
pable of appreciating any wild thing until, near- 
ing destruction, it becomes the prized pet of the 
gardener. Many an inhabitant of New England 
and the Middle States will tell of places where 
once the arbutus and the azalea made the slopes 
pink with their blooms, where now not a spray 
nor a bush can be found. 

To make the acquaintance of, to try to under- 
stand, to have a friendship for, to find out the 
needs of and to minister to those needs — to do 
these without destruction is the aim which should 
animate those who seek to teach science to chil- 
dren. 

Hence, do not bring nature to the child, but 
take the child to nature ; and when there let him 
keep his hands off until he has exhausted the ca- 
pacities of eye and ear. 

Nature in greenhouses, public gardens, and 
aquariums is not the best kind for children to 
see. She is then too concentrated, too orderly, 
too much trained and ruled by man, too tame and 
too small to make a proper impression on a 
child's mind. Every year Nature bows her wild 
spirit more and more to the demands of man, and 



SCIENCE 109 

moves in grooves which he appoints ; but fortu- 
nate above others are they who in childhood have 
seen her in her vastness, her untamed wildness 
and disorder, her solitary strength and original 
beauty. In such condition only can she inspire 
the noblest sentiments towards her. 

To remain in long or familiar contact with such 
conditions is possible to few children who can 
have, at the same time, such guidance as to make 
the most of the opportunity ; but within an hour's 
railway journey of many a large city in our land 
still remain natural features in almost undis- 
turbed, primeval grandeur ; and we will venture 
to say that in every such city enough is w r asted 
each year in municipal carelessness to send the 
children of every school to these places for at 
least one day. 

Field lessons should be the beginning, and, 
throughout, the foundation of lessons in science 
to children in all grades up to the high school. 

The object of these should be to acquaint chil- 
dren with nature as a whole, rather than with de- 
tached, isolated objects belonging to her; to give 
the child general impressions and large, inclusive 
pictures which may remain as permanent wholes 
in the child's mind, and to furnish an accurate 
setting or framework into which minutiae may be 
placed in due relation and perspective. 

These larger w T holes should not be vague, unde- 
finable blurs on the child's mind, but should have 
as definite, clearly marked limits and character- 
istics as are possible to man's present knowledge. 
The very blankness and plasticity of the child 



110 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

mind make it important that the impressions 
which are made should be accurate. The notion 
that half-truths, false notions, and slovenly obser- 
vation are good enough for a child and will be 
easily thrown off or corrected later in life is an 
outrage on any reasonable psychology of a child's 
actual conditions and needs. 

An illustration from personal experience may 
not be out of place here. I had read a few stand- 
ard works on geology, had done some field work, 
had taught the subject one year in a high school 
and one year in a normal school, and had I been 
asked about my general notions of the subject 
should have supposed them to be tolerably accu- 
rate. Yet one day, on reading an article in Nature 
about the depth of soils in river valleys, I was led 
to examine my general conception of the earth as 
a whole, geologically considered, and was startled 
to find that, without ever having thought about 
the matter, I had carried the vague notion that 
in some places the soil was of indefinite depth. 
Then and there my mind made its first clear 
picture of the earth as a ball of rock, with a soil 
which at its greatest depth was relatively very 
thin. 

On speaking of this matter to an eminent scien- 
tist, he told me that he was eighteen years old 
when he received his first clear impression of the 
earth as turning away from the sun at nightfall ; 
and that, although he had known the fact from 
childhood, the first realization came so late, and 
when doing what he had done hundreds of times 
before — gazing at the setting sun. 



SCIENCE 111 

The contents of adult minds would often aston- 
ish their owners could they be put into definite 
form ; and it is to avoid such hazy, incomplete 
conceptions in adult life that care should be taken 
to make definite and true to fact whatever con- 
ceptions a child gets. 

Also, treat a child with honest, high-minded 
courtesy. If the teacher does not know, let him 
say so frankly, and not put the child off with 
some specious excuse. If the teacher know that 
the child's question is one of the unanswered 
problems in nature or life, let him not hesitate to 
acquaint the child with the fact, thus stimulat- 
ing both the courage and the humility of the 
child and of himself, and deepening that most pa- 
thetic of all sources of comradeship — conscious- 
ness of a common ignorance and impotence. 

Preparation for a field lesson should be care- 
fully made. Prior to taking the children out the 
teacher should go over the route, select the feat- 
ures which are to be examined, and work out the 
detail of the examination, so that with the chil- 
dren there shall be no waste of time and effort, 
and no real distraction. The possibilities of dis- 
traction are such, in all field work, that but for a 
quick and sure holding of attention to a series of 
objects or phenomena wdiich have previously been 
selected with painstaking care, and now present- 
ed to the children with due regard to order and 
sequence, such lessons are apt to be valueless. 

Also, do not combine study and pleasure — a 
field lesson and a picnic — unless the teacher's 
power is practically boundless over the thoughts 



112 AN" EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

and emotions of the pupils. The thought of the 
picnic will lie in the child's mind as a disturbing 
force, which should not be there. If luncheon is 
required, let each child have his own, and think 
no more about it than he does on a stormy day 
at the school building. From beginning to end, 
a field day should be conducted with as much 
quiet decorum as a house day; and no more re- 
cesses or plays allowed to one than to the other. 

The field day should be, at once, the most seri- 
ous and the most delightful of school experiences: 
the most serious because in one clay materials for 
many days of indoor lessons should be gathered, 
and children and teacher should feel a zeal not 
to waste its precious possibilities ; and delightful 
because, whether understood or not, if the day be 
properly conducted both child and teacher will 
feel that bond of kinship with the planet as man's 
great mother which is perhaps the oldest and 
certainly one of the finest of human sensibilities. 

Advantage should be taken of special oppor- 
tunities and unusual phenomena — eclipses and 
transits, effects of floods, railway cuttings, borings 
of wells, storms, etc. If such arise on a day de- 
voted to other matters, vary the programme to 
take it in. 

On a field day whose purpose was the study of 
some forms of sea-life in situ, a child of six star- 
tled comrades and teacher with the exclamation, 
" See ! that vessel is sinking." The teacher raised 
her eyes and looked off shore. A half-dozen or 
more vessels were in sight at different distances, 
and so placed relatively as to illustrate well the 



SCIENCE 113 

rotundity of the earth. It was a clear day, and 
there was a placid sea, with but a slight breeze 
making an occasional ripple over its surface. A 
spirited discussion followed. The children, who 
were from five to nine years of age, decided that 
if the farther vessels were sinking they would 
show signals of distress, and the nearer would be 
putting out boats to help them. Meanwhile, the 
children discovered that the vessels sank more 
and more, until of one the upper part of the 
masts and sails only were apparently above wa- 
ter ; and one of their number suggesting that 
the sea must "get lower" the farther out the 
ships go, they all accepted that as a solution of 
the puzzle, and returned to their former labors. 

The topic was afterwards taken up in the school- 
room, and some experiments made of watching 
moving objects on flat and on rounded surfaces ; 
and by means of these combined experiences the 
rotundity of the earth became a living, realized 
fact to the children. The teacher was obliged to 
tell them the fact that observation of ships at 
sea from any point and in any direction would 
give the same results, so that the earth must be 
" rounded in all directions." 

Nature's changes should be noted and followed, 
with care to avoid conclusions until the cycle has 
been completed at least once : the migrations of 
birds ; the formation of buds in the autumn and 
their expansion and further development in the 
spring; changes in the coats and colors of ani- 
mals ; the varying lengths of the life periods of 
plants and animals ; the variations produced by 



114 AN" EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

differing opportunities as to soil, moisture, sun- 
light, exposure, etc. 

Teach the child to be definite about these by 
marking locations on maps or drawings, and keep- 
ing a record of times and conditions. For in- 
stance, if it is desired to have the child note the 
apparent movements of the sun from north to 
south, see that he has a definite starting-point — 
the chimney or gable of a house, a tree, or other 
feature which defines the place on the horizon 
where the sun sets or rises on a given day, as 
seen from a given point of observation — and then 
see that all subsequent observations are made 
from that point and with reference to that ob- 
ject. To secure independent observation in such 
a matter, each child better have his own indi- 
vidual point of observation and object of refer- 
ence. 

In this matter about the sun the child will soon 
be astonished at the change of place ; then when 
the sun returns upon its path instead of going all 
round the horizon he will wonder still more. Get 
the child's judgment of the phenomena, and be 
sure that it is based on thought. The point of 
observation and the object of reference have not 
changed in relative position to each other or to 
surrounding objects. The child will then proba- 
bly insist that the sun moves or changes place ; 
and he must be directly asked what other solution 
of the problem is possible, and perhaps helped by 
experiments with moving objects before he thinks 
of or clearly realizes that the earth as a whole 
may have moved. This point reached, tell him 



SCIENCE 115 

the facts, and, as far as possible, how astronomers 
have proved the correct solution. 

In all science work avoid waste of time and 
energy, and the carrying of rubbish, by the selec- 
tion of discriminating features. Perhaps to the 
eminent specialist there is no chaff in nature ; but 
certainly, for purposes of the child's study, there 
is much more chaff than kernel. It is not enough 
to teach any fact in nature ; there are millions of 
facts that relatively are chaff; and school years 
are not only too few to be wasted on such facts, 
but the contemplation of them is apt to obscure 
the power to discriminate the kernels. 

First of all, a child should learn not likenesses, 
but differences — those particular, distinguishing 
differences which differentiate one object from an- 
other. In the study of definite object and detail 
the child will often need to take the pieces apart 
so as to get a perception of the individualities 
which combined make the puzzling whole. That 
perception gained, all minor or other detail should 
be avoided in order that the individuality be not 
obscured. The aim should be to leave in the 
child's mind not a finished picture, as of fine de- 
tail of form, light and shade, and coloring, but a 
sharp, characteristic outline ; and all of the child's 
expressions of his knowledge in drawing, in mod- 
elling, and in speech should have this quality. 

The last two points are regarded of prime im- 
portance, because much of the teaching of science 
in kindergartens and lower grades which has been 
observed by the writer has sinned against the 
child's mind most grievously in this regard — mak- 



116 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

ing as much of chaff as of kernel, of the undis- 
criminating as of the discriminating features. 

Also, give names and use technical expressions 
freely. Language is indispensable to thought ; 
and while facts may be carried in memory in a 
series of pictures, they can be thought over and 
conveyed to others more easily if duly labelled 
with the proper linguistic forms ; and baby -talk 
or the avoidance of scientific expression is no 
more necessary with a student of five than of 
twenty -five. A word or an expression, as such, has 
neither terrors nor difficulties to a child's tongue 
or memory ; and when naturally associated with 
a clearly defined object, phenomena, or idea, will 
no more be lost from comprehension or conscious- 
ness than the thing which it symbolizes. It is 
not technical expression, but the separation of ex- 
pression from idea — the actual substance of ex- 
pression — that is the bane of school-rooms. 

While the first aim should be to give broad, 
general conceptions not only of large, inclusive 
wholes, but of individual objects and phenomena, 
some work each year should be of another sort. 
The child should be getting "something of every- 
thing," and also "everything of something." This 
"everything of something" should not be neglect- 
ed even with the youngest children. Select some 
object, phenomena, or topic, and keep it before 
the child's mind until it is comparatively exhaust- 
ed according to adult standards. Give short les- 
sons each day on it, until there are indications in 
some child of mental ennui or repulsion to it; then 
give a succession of varied lessons on other topics 



SCIENCE 117 

until the children have wearied of variety, when 
a return to the former subject will be a pleasure. 
In this manner some subject each year ma} 7 be 
exhaustively treated, and the child have a taste of 
that minute, painstaking investigation which de- 
velops the desire for and power of original re- 
search. The children themselves will be the best 
indices of the time element in this matter. 

During the ninth lesson on the cotton-plant — 
the only science subject the children had had for 
three weeks — a girl remarked, " I'm tired of cot- 
ton-plants." The teacher said nothing, but after 
the lesson she put away the cotton-plants and all 
other suggestions of their late lessons, and on the 
following day took up a new topic. Nearly three 
months later that same girl said, impulsively, " I 
wish we could have some more lessons on the cot- 
ton-plant," and the other children echoed her wish. 
Children — these were from five to nine years of 
age — will return to a former topic with the same 
zest as to a once -loved but recently neglected 
play. 

This brings to prominence the most important 
of all considerations in the teaching of children : 
it is the child, and not the teacher, who should 
decide when enough of one thing has been taken. 
A child's mind has natural tastes and repulsions ; 
knows when it has had enough, when nausea is 
imminent ; and it should be trusted — should no 
more be forced and stuffed against its inclinations 
than its body should be. 

Yet a child's physical body may be so pampered 
that its appetites are diseased, and his mind may 



118 AN EXPERIMENT Itf EDUCATION 

be similarly demoralized. It is not here meant 
(hat a child's whim shall be the guide to either 
physical or mental sustenance or activity; but 
that a given wholesome mental stimulus should 
not be forced upon all children alike, nor upon 
any child so long or so frequently as to create re- 
pulsion to it. 

There are plenty of wholesome mental stimuli, 
and to some of them each child will contentedly 
and spontaneously respond ; from that to which 
response is spontaneous he may be gently and 
gradually led to respond to those to which lie 
may have at first no power of response. A real, 
interior response, which can easily be detected in 
the manner and expression of the child, should be 
sought, and something is wrong where it is not 
obtained. 

Neither is it meant that there should never be 
any forcing beyond spontaneous response. Wheth- 
er any one can reach skill in any line without do- 
ing a deal of painstaking drudgery is an open 
question. Until children are well taught this 
question cannot be answered satisfactorily. It 
may be a Utopian dream to think that without 
the strain of labors that are forced drudgeries, 
without feeling the sweat and fever of competi- 
tion with other workers, a, man may reach the 
highest skill or eminence in a given pursuit ; but 
until children are differently taught it is permis- 
sible to think that, if well taught, the many would 
spontaneously do from interior need and desire 
what the many now do from exterior material or 
social necessities, and the rare few from inherent 



SCIENCE 119 

love. Either mankind is hopelessly mediocre and 
vulgar in possibilities of character, or the dream 
is not Utopian. 

As matters now are, some forcing seems neces- 
sary — something to spur the average, flagging, 
lazy, and slovenly mind. But forcing should be 
the last resort; the child should have a chance, 
during at least the first four years of school life, 
to find in himself a natural, spontaneous taste for 
mental activities; a desire for accuracy, finish, 
and excellence in those activities; and a willing 
zest in the exercise of them. The writer's expe- 
riences with children favor the hope that after 
four years of such opportunity as this book sug- 
gests no child would ordinarily be willing to miss 
a day at school, or to go without mental food any 
more than physical. 

Dogmatic statements about natural phenomena 
will often be made by children : they may be cor- 
rected or ignored. The latter is the better way 
where there is to be opportunity in subsequent 
study to correct them by the child's own observa- 
tions. 

The spirit which is found in the best post-grad- 
uate departments of the largest universities should 
be the spirit of work in all grades from the kin- 
dergarten up: a direct simplicity in dealing with 
phenomena, an avoidance of misplaced sentiment, 
a candid exposure of error and of the limitations 
of present knowledge, a genuine humility, and a 
reverent courage. Without these the first years 
of school life will have no true dignity and worth ; 
and the child suffers far more than the adult stu- 



120 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

dent from not living in an atmosphere of genuine 
dignity and worth. 

In preparing a science lesson for even the 
youngest children, a teacher, unless already fa- 
miliar with the latest researches in that line, 
should as far as possible read up in the largest 
works and latest publications all that is known 
about it. Elementary works are not a sufficient 
guide ; they are often poorly prepared, are seldom 
up to date, and the teacher who relies on them 
alone carries to his pupils an outlook too narrow 
and scrappy. 

The teacher should himself be free from direc- 
tion in this matter : he better make a poor selec- 
tion of what is most interesting and valuable or 
possible to teach to a child from a large treat- 
ment of the topic than to depend upon selections 
made by others. It is desirable that children 
use their mental powers freely, unlimited and un- 
hindered by any prejudices or worn grooves of 
thought ; and a teacher must emancipate himself 
from such grooves and deal with the larger as- 
pects if he is to bring about so desirable a result. 

The most harmful of all fetters which a teacher 
can have are false and narrow notions as to what 
a child can or cannot take — what a child thinks, 
feels, realizes, actually likes, and is capable of. 
The child is yet an unknown factor; observa- 
tions already made are hopelessly at variance; 
and it would be w r ell if every teacher could meet 
each new class with a blank sheet on which ori^- 
inal impressions could be recorded. 

Children understand far more than thev seem 



SCIENCE 121 

to ; trivial incidents and thoughtless expressions 
may make indelible impressions on their minds ; 
hence the necessity of the more thorough, pains- 
taking preparation on the part of the teacher to 
make an impression that is worth being indelible. 
Happy, interested children are rarely given to de- 
ceit ; so that no one ordinarily should contradict 
a child's statements about himself or judge for 
him. Trust him and give the courtesy due. 

Never tell a child that which will take the 
charm from a personal discovery. Let no false 
judgments pass ; but wait time and further ob- 
servation to correct them, if such waiting be feasi- 
ble, and it often is. But when a child's facilities 
for observation are exhausted, let the teacher give 
all that he knows about the topic as freely as he 
would to an adult, that the child may regard him 
as an ever-living stream, with ample drink for all 
and an abundance to go to waste. 



II 

HISTORY 

History, like science, deals with that which is 
perpetually in the process of becoming, has a 
great past, and goes forward to an unknown fut- 
ure. 

Science tries to describe the web which nature 
has woven and is weaving with an ever-chano-ing 
pattern. This web man affects, rending or mend- 
ing it according to his moods or his supposed ne- 
cessities; but these changes are like those which 
a child may make at the loom of its mother — a 
small tangle of broken threads or some pretty 
variation that she untangles or incorporates into 
her own pattern by a few skilful changes. It is 
that child only who in the presence of the great 
mother submits to her teaching, and willing^, pa- 
tiently tries to work out her pattern, whom she 
long tolerates at her loom. 

Is not history the same in kind, although ap- 
parently of man's weaving? He weaves; but 
does not some power behind him lay the warp, 
choose the woof, mix the colors, reel the shut- 
tles, work the treadles, and, despite man's best 
or poorest efforts, determine the final ensemble ? 
Not that man is altogether a puppet — without 



HISTORY 123 

him the web is naught — but that the final out- 
come is not his, and that, in detail, he is use- 
ful as he weaves according to a pattern not his 
own. As an organ in the social body — a finger, 
an eye, a foot — man as an individual is controlled 
by something other than his own inherent, spon- 
taneous necessities for movement. 

To recognize this, to be a servant of a large 
whole, to wait or to do according to that whole's 
needs, to respond to the impulse which arises 
from within or to the call from without, this is to 
be a maker of history. All doing does not help 
to make history any more than all weeds help 
to make gardens. To be able to distinguish be- 
tween the doing that makes history and the doing 
that shares the fate of the weed — for the great 
gardener is not slovenly nor neglectful measured 
by his own hours and days — is to have true moral 
discrimination. 

As power to discriminate conduct is more val- 
uable than power to discriminate objects and phe- 
nomena in nature, so is history a more valuable 
study than science ; and as a child's being begins 
and ends in conduct, he is ready to begin the 
study of history so soon as he can make an intel- 
ligent choice between two phases of conduct. 

While the foregoing likeness between nature 
and man may be true when viewed from the larg- 
est standpoint, from a narrower view nature and 
man present a marked contrast. Nature seems 
to possess a background of immutable law, which 
man has leaned upon with a sure trust, and in ac- 
cord with which he has developed the arts of civ- 



124 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

ilization. This background has been the goal of 
man's ambitions, the touchstone of his knowledge, 
the firm ground beneath his feet, and also the 
source of the pathos which is inseparable from 
the lot of every living thing. Man, on the other 
hand, seems to some extent to determine his lot ; 
his life may be the result of his apparent caprices ; 
and he cannot lean with surety on the future of 
any man's conduct, not even his own. 

From this point of view nature is restful. 
However wilful or capricious her moods or baf- 
fling her laws seem, man believes that the seem- 
ing measures his ignorance, and so is stung bv it 
to new efforts to reduce the apparent chaos to 
order ; while man is not restful but inspiring, 
with a power to stir and to teach which no fixed 
changeless order can have. Law forbids the for- 
mation of an ideal which transcends law ; but 
where no law is all things are possible. 

Man in his generous moods seeks to decrease 
the cruelties of nature by taking some living thing 
under his protection, ameliorating its natural lot, 
and cheating nature out of some of her pathos ; 
and out of such generous soil grows the egotism 
of lordship over both nature and man which ever 
fills the veins of youth. It takes age to see that 
the lordship is superficial ; let the teacher respect 
this fact, and encourage those interpretations of 
nature and man which spring naturally in youth- 
ful minds. 

That man may do what he will accords with 
youth ; that he must do what he can belongs to 
age. There is no sharper contrast than that be- 



HISTORY 125 

tween the attitudes of youth and of age: to the one, 
all things are possible ; to the other, hardly the 
negative power " to keep himself from evil." No 
one can fully appreciate this contrast who has not 
himself lived in both attitudes, and been through 
the painful experience of crossing the boundary 
between them. 

This constitutes a fundamental reason why the 
young in attitude should be the teachers of chil- 
dren, for age tends to seek fruit from stems that 
have not blossomed. 

The lessons of age are beyond computation in 
value to the social whole; but to the individual 
youth even the presence of age is hurtful, unless 
by retrospection it return to its former attitude, 
and give youth the freedom to grow in youth's 
own way. 

No mortal ever learns by the experiences of an- 
other ; from them he may get intellectual percep- 
tions, but not the emotional depth which seems 
necessary to make of an event a reality to the 
understanding. He learns by his own experi- 
ences, and another's experience but serves as a 
picture or comment by which to interpret his 
own. This is the proper point of view for the 
teaching of history. The child's own experience 
is the sole interpreter of historic facts which he 
can understand, and he should not be made to 
learn — that is, memorize — other interpretations. 

If history could be taught in accord with this 
point of view from childhood up, the action of 
youthful minds upon the facts of history would 
produce the effects that reinvestigations in science 



126 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

do, and present interpretations doubtless would 
give place to others. A child now learns that in- 
terpretation which expresses the bias of his imme- 
diate environment, and the interpretation which 
his own nature is capable of is either still-born 
or strangled by parent or teacher at its first cry. 

If a child is to have facts, and interpret them 
himself, with such comments and corrections as 
subsequent facts alone can make, much that passes 
for history must be ignored. He must have the 
original sources and nothing else, until the his- 
toric spirit has taken up its abode in him and be- 
come part of his fibre. 

That history begins in legend expresses man's ig- 
norance, and it expresses nothing more, however 
far the argument be pushed ; and if a child is to 
deal with facts, he should not begin with those 
makeshifts wherewith man has sought to glorify 
the limitations of his knowledge. Legend, myth, 
folk-lore, fairy tale, and the historical novel have 
their places — in both history and literature if they 
be worthy — but they should not be included in a 
scheme which seeks to develop in childhood the 
germs of an historic sense, and a sane, true out- 
look on human conduct. 

A child has great capacity for vivid picturing ; 
and until this capacity is trained in the faithful 
presentation of facts, its exercise on the grotesque 
or fanciful may do much harm, even to the warp- 
ing of the whole mental attitude in favor of the 
marvellous and miraculous. A sane and natural 
clearness and freedom in the outlook on life seem, 
above all things, needed at present. The dense 



HISTORY 127 

materialism of the nineteenth century may be but 
a reaction against a deeply rooted supernatural 
bias, which man revolts against but is powerless 
to quite get rid of. 

To keep the student from any sort of bias or 
romancing should be the aim of a teacher of his- 
tory, no less than it is the aim of teachers of sci- 
ence. 

Time covers her past with new growths, and a 
true historic spirit may perhaps be best developed 
by contact with that which is recent — at least, a 
child's study of history should begin with his own 
immediate environment. 

From babyhood a child lives in a world of sym- 
bols ; all of his toys are representations of some- 
thing larger and different ; and he is not at all 
deceived about the matter, so that he takes easily 
to the use of models, drawings, maps, and globes. 
For purposes of right method it will be necessary 
to construct one map of the school-room or school- 
grounds. If the latter is chosen, and can first be 
made on the soil of the grounds themselves, and 
afterwards transferred to paper, and thence to 
blackboard, so much the better. This map should 
be drawn to exact measurements and with refer- 
ence to the points of the compass, to show the 
children the quickest way to get at the best re- 
sults. 

Then show the child a map of the town which 
he lives in — a good model is better if the school 
possesses one, but an accurate map is better than 
a bad model ; tell him only so much as to distin- 
guish between the streets and the blocks of houses; 



128 AST EXPEKIME^T IN EDUCATION 

and then leave him to find his own residence. 
Children in small towns and villages will readily 
do this if left to themselves and not hurried ; in 
large cities they must ordinarily be helped by 
having the location of the most prominent build- 
ing or feature which is nearest to their residence 
pointed out. After locating his own residence, 
let each locate a few other residences and as many 
public buildings and general features as his own 
interest spurs him on to do. Each child should 
have a small map — his own possession — and the 
accuracy of his use of it should be tested by his 
locating the same points on a larger wall map. 

These preliminaries accomplished, the children 
are ready for their first lesson in history. Take 
them to the nearest point whose condition approx- 
imates the natural state, untouched by the hand 
of man ; lead them to note the presence or ab- 
sence of those features on which the lives of men 
depend, and any features peculiar to their own 
historic environment. Then tell them that where 
the town in which they live now is there was 
once such conditions as these — naming the condi- 
tions and any special differences from what they 
see before them. On the following day take the 
children to the highest point available in or about 
the town — a place from which as much of the 
town as possible can be viewed at a glance ; and 
after the children have taken in the sight tell 
them to shut their eyes and think away all the 
buildings, pavings, bridges, etc., and put in their 
places the original forest, grassy prairie, sage- 
brush plain, etc. 



HISTORY 129 

On subsequent days model and map that first 
condition. Then locate the first house in the 
town, and afterwards on model and map. If the 
house be still standing, take the children to it ; if 
not, to see where it was. 

At this point the teacher should carefully pre- 
pare, on transparent paper, a set of maps of the 
original condition, one for each child ; if a forest, 
shade lightly with a pencil ; if prairie, leave blank, 
giving outline only. These maps laid over the 
maps of the present will serve to deepen the con- 
trast between past and present. Then as each 
historic change is reached it should be located on 
the transparent map, and its place on the present 
map may be found by placing one map over the 
other. A little spot rubbed clean in the forest 
shade to show the first clearing, and the outlines 
of the first house and farm fields marked in it, 
will mean much to the child. In this manner 
reclaiming swamps, filling in rivers and harbors, 
changing the courses of streams, and all impor- 
tant changes, may be intelligently followed. 

After the first house is located it should be mi- 
nutely studied with regard to size, shape, materi- 
als used in construction, condition of these mate- 
rials, division of house into rooms, interior fin- 
ish, furnishings, etc. Make these details vivid by 
drawings and models, or by having the children 
actually construct and furnish a model on as large 
a scale as is feasible. 

Long before the details are finished the children 
may become eager to know the people who built 
such a house and used such furnishings, and will 



130 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

ask many questions. Lead the children to them- 
selves find, in surrounding conditions, answers to 
as many of their questions as these conditions can 
answer. If the house was made of logs, the for- 
est furnished them ; if of adobe, clay was abun- 
dant and trees scarce ; but why logs instead of 
boards? or sun-baked instead of kiln-baked bricks? 
If possible take the children to a saw-mill or a 
brick-kiln, and leave them to find the answer. 
Children who are not spoiled by being perpetually 
answered have usually remarkable acuteness of 
intelligence and good judgment, and leaving them 
to find their own answers will preserve these pow- 
ers and stimulate their use. 

The teacher must be apt to see the means or 
conditions which furnish the answer ; but that an- 
swer he should not formulate until not only the 
means and conditions but the child's own intelli- 
gence is exhausted. At the same time he should 
guard the children with rigid care from forming 
a habit of guessing. Better tell the child every- 
thing than let him make random, unreasoning 
guesses. Teach a child to think as to shoot, with 
a conscious care about the direction of the atten- 
tion and the aim or object of that direction. And 
avoid weariness : a child's muscles cannot long 
stretch the bow and aim the arrow, neither can 
his mind long retain the tension which is required 
for good work. The rule should be concentrated 
attention for a few moments, and then all the rest 
which the child will take. More than this is some- 
times necessar} T — actual command to cease work ; 
for a child, through his absorbing interest, often 



HISTOKY 131 

becomes insensible to weariness, just as adults do, 
and needs to be protected from himself. 

The environment exhausted for answers about 
the house and its furnishings, introduce the occu- 
pants. Where did they come from ? why to this 
place ? by what means ? how many clays' journey ? 
what did thev bring with them? etc. Let the 
children live over that family life, share its la- 
bors, hardships, and triumphs ; know the clothes 
they wore, the food they ate, the work they did, 
the amusements they had, and the changes they 
wrought. Always seek answers to the " Why ?" 
first in the conditions of the environment and 
its nearness or distance to other environments. 
What cannot be so answered will lead to the char- 
acteristics of the persons — age, health, industry, 
thrift, intelligence, education, etc. Thus in the 
study of the life of the first settler the child will 
come upon the great factors in history — environ- 
ment, human capacity, and the reaction of the one 
upon the other. 

This minute study of one beginning should 
form in the child's mind a background of knowl- 
edge and a method of research which may serve 
as a point of reference — the present is always in 
the mind as another point of reference — and a 
model for further study. 

This finished, go by rapid stages or leaps from 
one historically important point to another. 
Facts and persons are of no account as facts and 
persons merely ; but a fact or person that has 
helped the historic movement should not be 
slighted. Dwell with such facts and persons un- 



132 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

til their connection with the past and the changes 
which they produced are clearly apprehended. 

If a child's mind is kept in contact with such 
realities, and free from the suffocating smoke of 
dogmatic opinions about them, from kindergarten 
to college, he will possess a large body of valua- 
ble historic facts ; and another, more or less co- 
herent, of judgments about human conduct and 
character, which latter will be an expression of his 
own personal reaction on historic fact, and of the 
influence of such fact on his own character. Such 
a youth, having made and unmade his judgments 
over and over, would be ready to profit by con- 
tact with a mature and large scholarship without 
being stultified thereby. To such the best courses 
in history in our great universities would have 
meaning indeed. But they who reach the uni- 
versity are few. To all others books and com- 
mon men only would be accessible ; so that one 
duty of the teacher will be to introduce the child, 
as early as possible, to the masterpieces of his- 
tory. As soon as a child can read fairly well he 
can be set to work on passages the most interest- 
ing to him in the largest works. Let the pas- 
sages first selected be short, piquant, stirring; so 
that the child, instead of being wearied, will be 
stimulated to read more than has been assigned. 
A child who is well taught, even for a few years, 
will not be content with summaries of history, 
nor with the records of atrocities merely. 

Begin history with the first day in school ; let 
no week pass without its lessons; and if the child 
must leave school at twelve or fourteen he will 



HISTORY 133 

have gained an interest in historic movement 
which no accident of the years can destroy. 

When the immediate environment is exhausted, 
take up the thread which links that environment 
with the greatest event in the national history — 
in our land this may often be the Civil War. 
The history of that will lead by many interesting 
paths to all that is most important in the history 
of our nation and continent. 

From this great story fail not to pick out what 
youth most loves — deeds of heroism, endurance, 
and of the iron persistence of great natures. The 
story of La Salle's wanderings is more noble and 
more pathetic than that of Ulysses. The charm 
of that world-famed tale is not in its events or 
characters, nor in its supernatural accompani- 
ments, great as these all are, but in the combi- 
nations of these and in the exquisite diction of 
their final expression. Our continent needs a 
Homer to restore its heroes. 

Facts do not smother the poetic fire, but dog- 
matic opinion about fact does; and it is such 
opinion that is the curse of our age. Let us 
make a simpler, gentler atmosphere for human 
growth ; give each the privilege to think and to 
act for himself, without ridicule or ostracism, from 
two years old and upward ; and lo ! poetry will 
come back, and our heroes no longer lie in dis- 
honored or neglected graves. 

A proper study of history gives certain meas- 
ures of value which can hardly be so well gained 
in any other way. Minute study of the externals 
of life in different epochs shows how relative is 



134 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

their value as indices of prosperity , and how worth- 
less as guarantee of character or social status. 
And a boy or girl who has seen externals change 
from age to age will hardly think that those of 
his own time will remain, may not be improved, 
or in themselves are very potent factors. They 
are opportunity, and he is or should be the ruler 
thereof, not the slave. Moreover, this boy or girl 
may get some very old-fashioned notions about 
success. A man who amasses a property which his 
children squander may have missed the crucial 
point of success — the being passed on. What 
dies does not live ; and only that which lives and 
maintains its individual thread in the historic 
movement can be said to have succeeded, using 
the term with its truest meaning ; and this is true 
of measures as well as of men. 

This is still more true of thought. A plant dies 
for want of water within a few feet of a flowing 
brook ; so a man dies intellectually when he be- 
comes rooted to the soil of his own thoughts, and 
neglects to drink, clay by day, from the onflow- 
ing stream of living books and men. The plant's 
helplessness may be pitied and water carried to 
it ; but nothing can revive that man who re- 
fuses to pull his feet out of his own hard-pan 
and go drink freely for himself. This is one of 
the greatest lessons which the study of history 
teaches. 

Do not require or expect that the children will 
remember all that they show interest in, or even 
that the teacher thinks important to be remem- 
bered. One child will remember one set of facts 



HISTORY 135 

or historical phases, and another a different set; 
trust them and let each retain what he will. 

The one care of the teacher in the matter 
should be not what but how the child remem- 
bers. The what each child's own nature will de- 
termine. However much the teacher may labor 
in this regard, his results will be superficial and 
transitory, unless seconded by the child's nature, 
which inevitably is the real arbiter of its own pos- 
sessions. The how is the teacher's peculiar field, 
and in the matter of memory he largely deter- 
mines the order and accuracy of the child's men- 
tal habit. The teacher's mental habit will effect 
the result in the child's mind, whether the teacher 
desires that it should or not ; but whatever his 
own mental habit, he may do something to form 
in the child's mind habits of order and accuracy. 

Insist not that the child shall remember and 
reproduce any given facts or series of facts, but 
that what he attempts to reproduce he shall do so 
perfectly and in good order. 

Slovenly mental habits incessantly disturb the 
whole machinery of life everywhere ; they are the 
flaw in evidence, the friction in government, the 
irritation in social life, and the skeleton, first and 
last, in every man's closet. To know when you 
know and when you do not know ; and to be ca- 
pable of fearless, not-ashamed reticence or speech 
about the latter as about the former — this is one 
of the greatest boons educational training can con- 
fer; and to confer it is the teacher's privilege. 
He cannot make mind, he cannot greatly alter 
the inherent, natural bias of a given mind — and 



136 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

perhaps he ought not to desire to, lest he warp 
what is better than his own ideal — but he can 
train mind, and, in a large measure, determine 
the quality of its activities. 

To set a child a task which is beyond his ca- 
pacities is folly ; but a task assigned, the child 
should — time enough being allowed — do it as well 
as an adult would under the same circumstances. 
Age should not be allowed to determine the qual- 
ity of results in any department of effort ; the 
kind and amount age must determine, but the 
quality never. The child must learn, must do 
over and over, in order to reach the proper qual- 
ity ; but so must adults at all ages. A woman 
who has never handled a needle may be as awk- 
ward with it, on first trial, as a child is. Ask lit- 
tle of a child, and see that he reaches perfection 
in it. 

Also, if a child choose his task, insist on the 
same perfection, if within his capacities, no matter 
how irksome to the child, or how ill-adapted the 
choice. The teacher should try to protect a child 
from bad choices ; but once made, they should be 
borne to the bitter end ; so shall a child learn the 
limitations of his capacities and tastes, grow mod- 
est and truth-loving, and become fitted for the in- 
evitable burdens which circumstances and his own 
choices will surely bring to his lot. 

It is customary to teach a child something — a 
bit of poetry, a fairy tale, etc. — and when the child 
has learned it in a haphazard way to praise him, 
and to laugh at his picturesque or humorous vari- 
ations. Remonstrance at this usually brings the 



HISTORY 137 

excuse, " Why, he is only a child." During a visit 
to a famous school a class of children from eight 
to ten years of age was taken from the usual pro- 
gramme to illustrate and recite some tales, be- 
cause the work in them was thought to have been 
exceptionally good. Each child was told where 
to begin, and not one of them told his part of 
the tale without gross inaccuracies. Is inaccuracy 
synonymous with childhood ? Nay, childhood can 
especially be accurate, since it is fearless, unbiassed, 
and has keen perceptions and great retentive grip. 
Forbid an inaccurate, slipshod, slovenly statement 
in childhood, and the unconscious liar will cease 
to exist. 

In some schools historv is begun in the lower 
grades by teaching the mythological tales. My- 
thology is certainly a part of history, because it is 
a part of the lives of the people; but it can be un- 
derstood as history from the standpoint only of 
the peoples of whose lives it was a part. To them 
it was a religion, the highest, holiest thing they 
knew, and can be understood only in connection 
with other aspects of their being; and there seems 
no valid reason for beginning the study of any 
people with the religious aspect of that people. 

Indian myths also are given, as though they 
were the beginning of our history. The Indian 
has played a small part in the historic movement, 
and his superstitions can never be more than one 
of the curiosities of human belief — work for the 
antiquarian and specialist, but hardly a fair gift 
to a child whose years in school are few. More- 
over, the Indian lias few points in common with 



138 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

us. His nature is alien and does not assimilate 
with ours, and his nearness to us is superficial, the 
accident of a previous occupation. 

The Scandinavian and the Greek are our kin- 
dred, our legitimate ancestors in blood and in 
spirit ; but as a good man does not teach his child 
those superstitions of his forefathers which he has 
himself outgrown, so should the religions of the 
Greek and the Norseman not be given to our 
children. Let all mythologies wait until they can 
be understood for what they are, and their beauty 
and force felt in connection with the life which 
they adorned and solaced. 

Remember that a child's mind is not yet fixed 
in grooves or limits ; and that the finest seal will 
make as indelible an impression on his plastic ca- 
pacities as the coarsest. 

That optimistic view of life— unfailing reward 
for good and retribution for evil conduct — which 
it seems to be thought necessary to keep before 
children, this study of history will correct. What- 
ever views a man may cherish about the final out- 
come of human conduct, the actual results in all 
communities sometimes favor the immediate evil 
instead of the immediate good. Youth is not slow 
to see the fact, and sometimes to make of it a li- 
cense for his own bad passions or greed. To some 
minds this may seem a sufficient reason why his- 
tory should not be taught to children unless from 
expurgated or selected documents, or b}^ a teach- 
er who will counteract the effects of actual facts 
by insisting that there must have been blame 
where no evidence of blame is, or somehow, some- 



HISTOliY 139 

where beyond our ken, justice must Lave ruled. 
It might be well for such objectors to spend a few 
days and nights with Plato's ideas about justice, 
as the perfect doing of his own proper work by 
each social unit. This conception might possibly 
come to seem a feasible one for the bringing up 
of a child by. 

The natural world is full of catastrophe and ap- 
parent cruelty to the individual, and so is the hu- 
man. To hide this fact from a youth is to fill his 
mind with illusions ; to misinterpret it, with ego- 
tism, rancor, or a misplaced humility. 

From the point of view of this chapter history 
is the movement of events and what moves, be it 
persons, ideas, customs, or institutions, and is con- 
cerned with the records as merely vehicles of this 
content. 

A child's consciousness is continually occupied 
with movements and what moves, and rarely with 
record keeping ; and to fasten his attention upon 
the record is to give him the dry husks of history 
instead of its living reality. 

The records themselves he will retain and learn 
to discriminate their values in proportion as his 
mind is concentrated upon the trend of events 
and the conditions which produce that trend, and 
the record is lost sight of save in its to him un- 
conscious use as an adjunct to his thinking and 
picturing the events. 

Such corrections of the historical narrative as 
are made from age to age depend less upon the 
discovery of new documents than upon the new 
point of view which some one gets of the move- 



140 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

ment, and so gives to the same old documents a 
new content. 

Records are to history " the letter that killeth," 
for the movement itself has charm to students of 
all ages, and especially to children ; and it is here, 
in connection with the actual movements of our 
human whole, that a child's fondness for stories 
should be fostered and fed. 



Ill 

LITEKATURE 

Literature lifts one into an ideal world, as dis- 
tinguished from the actual world of science and 
of history ; and the excellence of any given prod- 
uct in literature depends chiefly upon the quality 
of that ideal. 

For youth, literature as an educational factor 
has uses for instruction, correction, refuge, and 
delight. 

All changes over which man has control occur 
first in the mind ; so that which changes man's 
conceptions of what is desirable helps to create 
that which shall be. In this sense literature is a 
prophec} 7 — a creation in the ideal world, by the 
greatest minds, of those models or patterns ac- 
cording to which lesser minds continually work 
out the actual world. 

Hence, from childhood up, literature should sup- 
plement all other departments of study, in order 
that those processes of transformation which stead- 
ily go on in humanity, as a whole, may not be 
lacking to any individual mind ; for only through 
those transformations which take place in his own 
mind does any man help to create the future. As 
a mere machine, he may perform the will of an- 



142 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

other mind ; but such labor affects the body only, 
never the soul or vital principle of any reform. 

As the point of view and the thing viewed are 
of equal importance in scientific and historical re- 
search, perhaps the best corrective for distorted 
facts is a change in the point from which those 
facts are viewed ; and one of the especial offices 
of literature is to correct our points of view. 

Scientific and historical studies, pursued by 
themselves alone, are prone to beget a hard way 
of looking at both nature and man — the so-called 
matter-of-fact way, which regards sentiment as a 
hinderance, and forgets, for a time, that emotion 
is as fundamental a factor of mind as perception, 
and is quite often a truer interpreter of facts and 
phenomena. If there be mind in nature, there is 
feeling there ; and feeling alone can interpret 
feeling; and no man is without emotions which it 
takes emotions to interpret, so that both nature 
and man demand the free play of the emotions 
for their fullest interpretation. 

Moreover, if, as psychologists affirm, feeling 
probably precedes thought, is the initial phase of 
all mental phenomena, all ideal conceptions have 
their germination in the emotions. Certain it 
is that in literature, which is an expression of 
man's ideal world, and the prototype of the actu- 
al, the emotions are allowed a freedom which is 
denied them in scientific and historical research. 

Also a man often feels the falsity or truth of 
a thing, or the ugliness or beauty of it, long before 
he can give to his perceptions or reason a satis- 
factory account of why he feels as he does ; and 



LITERATURE 143 

in the best literature one is continually finding 
his own vague, undefined emotions put into clear 
expression, so that thenceforth he can give a 
clear account of the faith that is in him. In this 
way literature helps a man to have faith in him- 
self, and to correct those petty, limited points of 
view which may belong to his environment by 
those of the larger, greater minds who have inter- 
preted mankind to itself from age to age. 

Every man needs a refuge, even from himself; 
and literature is perhaps the. only refuge which 
will never fail him. It is probable that every 
problem of our human life has somewhere had a 
solution, every aspiration of man somewhere an 
expression ; and in so far as literature is a record 
of these solutions and expressions, it may help to 
supply every human want. The world of mind 
is as real as the world of matter ; and he to whom 
the world of matter is especially hard, narrow, and 
cruel may find in the world of mind that fulness 
of being — that is, of experiencing — which each 
man instinctively craves. 

The harder the lot, the narrower the life in 
matter, the greater the need of fulness in mind ; 
hence literature should not be the possession of 
a leisure class, but peculiarly the possession of 
that hard-working class which most needs the 
refuge and enlargement which literature gives. 
Literature is pre-eminently the tribute which the 
leisure class pays to the laboring class, as the la- 
boring class pa} T s to the leisure class the tribute 
of physical toil ; but thus far the laboring class 
seems not to have realized its privilege, and one 



144 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

of the greatest duties of a teacher is to bring this 
realization to consciousness in each mind. 

This is, perhaps, a bad use of the word leisure. 
The production of literature requires exemption 
from physical toil and the nagging irritations of 
extreme poverty ; but none the less is that pro- 
duction labor of a most exacting kind; and a 
youth who does not realize this fact will have 
missed consciousness of a vital point in human re- 
lations. 

It is a matter of the focus-point of attention. 
If circumstances compel that point to be in the 
material realm, it cannot at the same time be in 
the mental ; but because the ideal is the pattern 
for the actual, the worker in matter should be fa- 
miliar with the ideal world, although it may not 
be his province or within his power to create in 
that world. 

It is this ideal element which makes literature 
so peculiarly a refuge for all sorts and conditions 
of men, and at all ages. To childhood and youth 
life is especially hard where circumstances pull 
one way and inclinations another, and the scald- 
ing tears which youth sheds over hopes that are 
crushed and limitations that are inexorable have 
no balm so sweet as that which books afford ; 
and when the spirit is finally bent to the inevita- 
ble conditions of one's lot, books keep alive in the 
nature much that would otherwise die, and for- 
bid the formation of those rigid lines in thought 
which prevent further mental growth. One who 
loves, not the confirmation of his pet dogmas, but 
fresh ideas, will always be hospitable towards 



LITERATURE 145 

books, and by means of them continue to grow as 
long as life lasts, no matter what his exterior, 
physical lot may be ; so that literature is a pre- 
server as well as a refuge. 

To the body of the worst criminal, men allow 
sleep ; how much more needful the cessation of 
action in a vicious mind. Mind, whether virtuous 
or vicious, needs to have, every day, the pulses of 
its life beat without conscious effort of its own, 
needs a rest in which the great, normal forces of 
mental vitality resume their sway. The reading 
of a book which is an absorbing pleasure while it 
lasts supplies this need. What sleep is to the 
body are hours with such books to the mind — a 
readjustment of the vital energies, a return to men- 
tal health and vigor. This is the last and the 
greatest, use Gf books ; and a use from the need of 
which no mortal is exempt from cradle to grave. 
Other things may temporarily perform this office 
— a day among mountains or by the sea ; the con- 
templation of a work of art ; the satisfaction of a 
great affection ; music and the drama — but noth- 
ing which is within the reach of all can perma- 
nently do it but literature ; because, like the 
body's need of sleep, the mind's need of this rest 
returns day by day, and books only can always be 
on hand. 

One who has access to a good public library 

need not lack for those uses which books perform ; 

thousands who might have such access do not 

know how to seek it, and would not know how to 

use it if they had it. Hence to teach a youth 

how to use books, and to form in him a habit of 
10 



146 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

using them, will go far towards securing for him 
all the benefits which an habitual use of books 
confers, for to increase the demand will increase the 
supply of libraries and their facilities. Moreover, 
a real lover of books will possess some copies of 
his own, no matter how poor he is, for the " must 
haves " of daily existence are usually supplied ; 
and a book which costs but half a dollar may last 
a lifetime and be a perennial pleasure. 

A book is, on first publication, of value in pro- 
portion to what its readers get out of it, quite in- 
dependently of what its author meant to put into 
it. This value changes because the readers change ; 
but, at last, a book which survives more than one 
generation of men comes to have an intrinsic val- 
ue; and books which have survived for centuries 
may be said to express something which is generic 
and constant in humanity — to supply needs which 
are universal in time, and know no distinctions of 
race, sex, environment, belief, or condition. Be- 
cause this is true, such books should be made the 
basis of all work in literature during the first 
years of school life ; in order that no child may 
leave school unacquainted with them. 

Good literature has a power of charm, even to a 
child, which no lesser product has — a rhythm and 
a harmony of thought and emotion which insensi- 
bly pass into those who hear it well read, and af- 
fect the innermost being. Therefore, read to the 
little child the greatest products of the wisest 
men, a saying, a paragraph, or stanza at a time, 
and repeat them over and over; and when school- 
days come, treat the child with the respect which 



LITERATURE 147 

it is hoped may be due to the man or woman 
which he or she may become; and leave the 
weeds and transient growths in literature to those 
who do not yet know them for what they are. 

Hunger is sharp in childhood, and will stuff it- 
self with scraps and porridge if the parent be too 
poor or too penurious to provide a better diet. 
Mental hunger shares a worse fate ; for it is not 
even wholesome scraps and porridge which most 
children get. 

Can pyrites deceive the miner who has taken 
out thousands of gold ? No more can the " fool's 
gold" of literature delude those who have been 
made familiar with the real metal. The pyrites 
of life an adult cannot hope to escape contact 
with ; but that adult only will surely know it at 
first glance or touch who has from childhood been 
familiar with the gold. 

A thing cannot be defined in terms of itself ; 
and the true character of an inferior thing is fully 
appreciated by him only who is acquainted with 
its superior. Childhood is the period when stand- 
ards are formed ; and no adult ever quite escapes 
from bondage to those values which he learned in 
childhood. If then it is desirable to possess pow- 
er of instinctive recoil from that which is unnat- 
ural, disorderly, ugly, and foul, either in life or in 
books, a child must live long enough in contact 
with the opposites of these to have his own being 
attuned to those opposites. 

The teacher himself may not care for the great 
books, but let him not on that account keep them 
from his pupils. A child may take delight in a 



148 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION" 

work which an adult is untouched by ; and a 
teacher may assist at the development of tastes 
and the formation of habits that in quality may 
transcend anything which he is capable of. 

One evening a child of nine overheard the 
reading of Romeo and Juliet. On the following 
day she asked permission to take the book ; and 
thereafter, throughout the winter of her tenth 
year, she read Shakespeare until she had read his 
complete works, and several plays many times 
over. At first it seemed incredible that a child 
whose parents were uneducated, who until eight 
years of age had neither seen books nor heard 
them much talked about, and who at nine pos- 
sessed copies of The Arabian Nights and Ander- 
sen's Fairy Tales, should appreciate Shakespeare 
sufficiently to leave for him, day after day, other 
books and play. Kallied and chaffed about the 
matter, she proved her interest by repeating pages 
with a manner, a tone, and a facial expression 
that were unmistakable. The writer's liking for 
Shakespeare came late, and perhaps has never 
reached such a pure and absorbing delight as that 
child felt at ten. 

It is not that every child can reach such heights 
of appreciation, but that he should be provided 
with opportunities and incentives, and then left 
to deal sincerely with the books and with his own 
nature. 

Let the greatest books be always a presence to 
the child, free to his touch, and, as he learns to 
read, free to his explorations. Do not fear con- 
tamination. Impurity does not exist for him who 



LITERATURE 149 

is unconscious of it. The child above mentioned, 
through three years of intimate familiarity with 
Shakespeare, asked no questions, and gave no 
sign of being in anywise conscious of that which 
the most scrupulous would wish a child to be un- 
conscious of. 

This early familiarity with the greatest works 
is the child's opportunity, the stimulus to his nat- 
ure. If his nature respond, the teacher's task is 
thenceforth easy ; but it is not yet accomplished, 
for there remains the necessitj^ to build up a habit 
which shall last a lifetime. The capacity to enjoy 
a good book does not insure the reading of one. 
Thousands have the capacity and do not know it, 
and other thousands know it and do not use it. 
The first duty of a teacher, in literature, is to 
bring the capacity to consciousness in each mind ; 
but a far greater task it is to build on that con- 
sciousness a life-long habit. 

This can be done by reading only. At first 
nothing should stand between the child and what 
he hears read or reads. No fear should be allowed 
to come near his mind, no comments should be 
made, no unasked-for instruction given. The child 
should be asked no questions, nor be required to 
ask any himself, nor to repeat or reproduce any- 
thing heard or read. He should be free to re- 
spond naturally, and to let whatever love for lit- 
erature there is in his mind germinate and grow 
unchecked, and all of his questions should be 
truthfully answered. 

During the first years of school life read to the 
child from the greatest thought the w r orld has. 



150 AN" EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

The voice of the reader should be melodious, 
pleasant to hear, and the reading should be sim- 
ple and clear ; so that whether the child get any 
definite results or not, he shall like to listen. As 
soon as the children can read, copy on the black- 
board some fine, short passage, and let them read 
that passage, the teacher stopping for it at the 
right place. That passage the children will prob- 
ably remember. Put the picture of the author on 
an easel before the children, that the eyes shall 
have a focus-point, and the mind build up a true 
association between the author and his thoughts. 
Pictures of places, buildings, etc., should also be 
used whenever it is convenient to get them. But 
be not too scrupulous about this matter of illustra- 
tion. A child takes in through his ear more easily 
than through his eye; he is alive to sound far 
more than most adults are. In scientific and his- 
torical studies he will have abundant training in 
getting at knowledge through the eye ; in litera- 
ture he should have cultivation through the ear, 
until he is sensitive to all that is best in the sounds 
and rhythms of human speech, and accurately and 
quickly grasps ideas and forms mental pictures 
through sound alone. 

When a child is able to read give him books 
galore, the best in every line, until he knows that 
many books and many lines of thought yield the 
uses of literature — instruction, correction, refuge, 
and delight ; and not until the refreshment of a 
good book is as imperative as the refreshment of 
a good dinner can the habit of reading be said to 
have been formed. 



LITERATURE 151 

If a child's nature does not respond to the stim- 
ulus applied, do not infer mediocrity nor judge 
future possibilities. A woman who had twice 
failed to get anything out of Dante — once in her 
twenties and again in her early thirties — at forty 
picked up a copy and was surprised to find it 
interesting ; and thereafter for some weeks her 
leisure was absorbingly filled with it. 

The teacher may hope that if the response does 
not come early it may come late, and that the 
early contact is not time and energy wasted, since 
it leaves a memory of something to which others 
respond, without which memory the stimulus 
might not be applied when the power of response 
has been gained. 

After one trial — extending at intervals over 
several years — of the great books, the child should 
be allowed to reject them if he wishes to do so ; 
also, these years of trial should be broken by ex- 
cursions into lesser fields. The teacher should try 
now one book, now another, until he thinks he 
knows what is the phase of literature to which 
each child can instinctively respond ; then, for 
each, the best in his chosen phase should be pro- 
vided. This is food to the individual self, and it 
should not be stinted ; but along with it should 
go conscientious work in lines which all follow 
alike. In literature a double life must be provid- 
ed—that which the wise have declared to be good, 
and for each that which he himself likes. 

Let the teacher not forget that to each child a 
book is of value, not in proportion to what its 
author has put into it, nor to its intrinsic excel- 



152 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

lence, but in proportion to what the child gets out 
of it ; and be slow to censure, despise, and, more 
than all, ridicule a child for his judgment of any 
book. The child's ultimate needs are known to 
himself alone, and, whatever they are, they should 
be respectfully treated. 

Fiction may be as necessary to a child's men- 
tal life as sweets are to his physical, but neither 
should be allowed to take the place of other nour- 
ishment or be too frequently indulged. That a 
child has so insatiable a craving for " stories " that 
nothing else can delight him is about as true as 
that his liking for candy necessarily forbids a rel- 
ish for good bread. The wide-spread notion that 
a child must be fed on fictitious and romantic 
stories may be quite as responsible for common hab- 
it in this matter as is the nature of childhood. A 
child may live in an unreal, dream world because 
it has been created by others and forced upon 
him rather than because his own nature finds in 
such a world its natural expression and sustenance. 
There are intelligent children who ask of a tale if 
it be true, and, receiving a negative answer, re- 
fuse to listen further. It is possible that the great 
mass of juvenile books of all sorts would rot on 
their shelves if schools were provided with an 
abundance of historical and biographical narra- 
tive, true tales of travel and adventure, and the 
best books in the literatures of all times and peo- 
ples. It is, perhaps, not fiction^<?r se that is so ob- 
jectionable, but the poor quality of most that is 
offered. Yet of the very best fiction — fairy stories 
included — it is perhaps most wise to regard it for 



LITERATURE 153 

the young child as the sweets of mental nourish- 
ment, to be most carefully selected as to quality, 
and given in the play hours of the mind. 

In considering the later years of school life the 
modern novel must be taken into account. The 
youth cannot be kept away from what he finds at 
home, in society, in travel, everywhere. The ex- 
ceptional youth of exceptional training can be left 
to his own tastes and judgments, but the average 
youth with the average training cannot. 

The modern novel is a vehicle for serrous prop- 
aganda, is realism gone mad on the most vicious 
side of life, as though there were no more a real- 
ism of the virtuous side. We are too. near to 
judge whether this is a vagary or a serious de- 
parture. Certain it is that some people still pre- 
fer their viands separate and a clean plate for 
each. 

Serious subjects of study are not in themselves 
disgusting or nauseous, however painful to the 
emotions or destructive to self-love their revela- 
tions are ; it is when out of place that they irri- 
tate beyond endurance. No sincere, thoughtful 
person objects to knowing the true state of hu- 
manity, in slums or elsewhere, nor doing some- 
thing towards ameliorating the common lot ; but 
all have a right to object to being treated insin- 
cerely or taken for imbeciles. 

Is it not insincere treatment to have intense 
sentimentality, a prurient, morbid sensuality, and 
vicious, crime-stained personalities held up as pict- 
ures of modern life — conditions contradicted in 
the experiences of us all \ Is it not being taken 



154 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

for imbeciles when it is thought that persons 
whose touch would be a loathsome contamination 
in real life can be pleasant company in a book ? 

Why try to make familiar to the mind's senses 
what the body's senses must hate and loathe ? 
There must be one of two results — a breaking 
down and debasement of all the sensibilities, or a 
hopeless, pessimistic outlook on life. This is no 
plea for that innocence which is ignorance ; for 
all knowledge of all sorts which a man or woman is 
likely to find useful through life's journey should 
not be stinted ; but there are times, places, and 
conditions which "good form" for the mind re- 
quires for the giving of certain kinds of instruc- 
tion, as surely as "good form" in social relations 
requires the seclusion of certain personal offices 
to the privacy of one's own apartment. It is the 
horrible mixture of things, all sorts on one plate 
— nauseous medicines and nasty herbs mixed up 
with the daintiest fruits — that makes some mod- 
ern novels so exasperating to a refined and dis- 
criminating palate. 

Aside from the fact that a false extension of 
one's outlook on life may be worse than no exten- 
sion, there is a limit to the burden which any 
mortal can healthfully carry : to increase the bur- 
den is to take from the efficiency of the man as 
a worker ; and there is such a thing as having too 
much knowledge of human vices and miseries. 

If it be desirable to carry a sunny, flexible, 
growing spirit through all the cares and sorrows 
of life, give to the youth what will nourish such 
a spirit — contact with all possible brightness, 



LITERATURE 155 

beauty, movement, and growth ; and keep him 
away from what is stagnant and loathsome until 
he has the strength of a man in him, and knows 
where refuge can be found from stagnation, wea- 
riness, and foulness. 

The average man can do but little to change 
the lot of any other man ; he can hardly keep his 
own feet from slipping. Then teach to the average 
child and youth what he is most likely to need as 
a man to make his own lot mentally endurable ; 
and let the offices of literature be for personal use 
in interpreting the man to himself, and in satisfy- 
ing those needs which are the deepest and most 
universal. 



IV 
LANGUAGE 

In the work which is described in Part I. no 
experiments were made in teaching foreign lan- 
guages, because of certain difficulties in the way 
of making such experiments as were desired. 
French was taught to the children throughout 
the three years by a competent Frenchwom- 
an, but it had no connection with their other 
studies. 

It was desired that the sentences which the 
children themselves constructed, and which were 
the basis of their reading and writing in Eng- 
lish, should be made the means of introducing the 
children to another language ; and, as nearly as 
work which has never been done can be described, 
it would have been as follows, no allowance being 
made in this general statement for the opportu- 
nities which those children had for hearing another 
language spoken, either at home or about Boston. 
An}^ general plan must, for intelligent application, 
be modified to conform to the conditions of the 
child and of his environment. 

Before teaching a foreign tongue some desire 
to know it, some curiosity and interest about it, 
should be awakened, in order that the child may 



LANGUAGE 157 

have something within his own mind which can 
make an intelligent response to the stimulus from 
without. 

If the language be French and there is a French 
quarter of the town, make several trips to that 
quarter to impress the fact that there are people 
of all ages who habitually speak French to one 
another. Then, by means of models, maps, globes, 
pictures, and narratives, make France as real to 
the children as possible, particularly the lives of 
French children — their homes, toys, games, and 
schools. When the child has taken in the fact 
that there are miles and miles of populated coun- 
try, many villages, and large cities where all the 
people speak this strange tongue, where even the 
baby thinks " Veau " instead of " the water," he 
has begun to appreciate the artificial character 
of language and the inexorable barriers which it 
creates — artificial because the human need is the 
same, the expression only varies ; and inexorable 
because nothing but hard toil can cross the bar- 
rier. The language must be learned sentence by 
sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word, idiom 
by idiom. 

Fortunately, the child cannot feel the difficul- 
ties of this barrier as an adult mav, but he will 
realize that he cannot enter into the French child's 
life and share it, nor the French child into his, 
without each learning to speak as the other does ; 
and as in schools all over France children are 
learning to use his mode of expression for our 
common wants, so children in this land are learn- 
ing the Frenchman's mode ; and both are neces- 



158 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

sary to each if they are to understand one another 
when they meet. 

This preliminary work done, the child is ready 
to beo-in the language. The sentences which are 
kept for their reading of English (see Part I., 
pages 3 to 13) are their own expressions for ideas 
which they have gained by their own personal 
observation, experiment, or other effort. It is 
presumable that those ideas are clearly appre- 
hended. To express those ideas in good, idio- 
matic French ; to write them on the blackboard 
in columns parallel to the English expressions ; to 
have the idea suggested, and then its expression 
in English and in French alternately given, not 
only in speech, but in silent thought ; to have 
the French sentences printed opposite to the Eng- 
lish sentences on alternate pages; to have the 
children write the French as often as they do the 
English— to have this done until, for these sen- 
tences, the French expression is as familiar as 
the English expression ; and this work continued, 
month by month, would insure that the children 
learned to read and write French as rapidly as 
they learn to read and write English. 

If from the beginning and throughout every 
lesson care is taken to have the child think a 
given idea or statement in French after read- 
ing it in English, and the child is urged to try 
to pass directly from the object or phenomenon 
to the French expression as the French child 
would, he would soon be able to give the French 
expression first. For instance, suppose a science 
lesson has been finished in which have appeared 



LANGUAGE 159 

ideas for which the child has already all or nearly 
all the materials for expression, and during the 
lesson has, without thinking about it, used for 
such expression his own language ; suppose that 
the reading lesson follow, and the teacher, in- 
stead of asking the children to tell, as hitherto, in 
English what they have learned — as the child 
naturally has done and would do without the 
word English being used — says, " Let us fancy 
ourselves in France and tell what we have learned 
as we should if we were French children and had 

just had a lesson on " This effort should be 

made until it can be successfully accomplished. 

In this manner a child might learn more than 
one foreign tongue while learning to read, write, 
and correctly use his own. The time would be 
lengthened some, the learning to read and write 
English would progress more slowly, and fewer 
sentences would be used ; but the gains would 
more than balance these losses. Moreover, the 
losses would not be real ; for these conditions 
would last through the initial stages only, and the 
use of three or more lan^uasres so increase facil- 
ity in the use of any one of them that after some 
years the child so taught would know his own 
language quite as well as does the youth who 
knows no other, and would have, besides, the same 
easy familiarity with two or more foreign lan- 
guages. 

A child so taught would come to regard lan- 
guages as a sort of clothes to the pictures and 
ideas in his mind. These are the same, whatever 
speech is used for expressing them, just as his own 



160 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

body is not changed by putting on a different suit 
of clothes. Then, without embarrassment or hes- 
itation, he could put the same living idea into one 
suit or another at pleasure. 

This is what it was hoped to do with both 
French and German in the Boston experiment; 
but as no attempt of the sort was made, it is im- 
possible to tell how far such an experiment would 
have justified the anticipated results. Certain 
it is that few people ever reach such freedom 
from bondage to one language and such famil- 
iarity and easy use of several as it was thought 
could be acquired by a proper beginning in child- 
hood. 

Also, it was thought that Latin and Greek 
could be taught in a similar manner, since it 
would be almost as easy to make old Rome and 
Athens live again in a child's imagination as to 
present Paris and Berlin. Moreover, the associa- 
tions of these ancient languages would make a 
more quick and indelible impression than those of 
the modern tongues, because the life was so dif- 
ferent, and the very order of thought different; 
so that in entering into and trying to live over 
the life of a Greek or Roman child, the child of 
our day constructs a world with differences of a 
sort that have an especial charm for him. 

In some spring month dress the children in 
Greek garments and have a Greek flower festival. 
On some winter night collect them in a Roman 
room, in Roman dress, and give them Roman 
games and a Roman supper. Would the children 
forget such experiences % 



LANGUAGE 161 

Greek and Latin could be made as living and as 
real to a child of our day as any modern tongue is 
if Greek and Latin scholars would but turn atten- 
tion to the needs of children and supply them in 
this line. Many who are lovers and teachers of 
children would gladly try this experiment if their 
own knowledge of Greek and Roman childhood 
and their power to use those languages were but 
adequate. The reproach which Milton makes, 
that after seven years of study a classic cannot 
be read without a dictionary at the elbow — true 
of college students to-day also — could not be true 
of those taught so early and so well. 

If it be worth while to learn a foreign tongue, 
either ancient or modern, it is worth while to 
make experiments in teaching languages until 
means are reached of decreasing the present felt 
burden of learning a language and of making it a 
permanent possession. 

Even the rank ancLfile of teachers of languages 
turn to their own for refreshment, and will read 
a good translation of a classic in preference to the 
original ; and of college graduates who are not 
teachers, fewer still read in a foreign tongue any- 
thing which they can read in their own. To 
spend from six to ten years at Latin and Greek 
and yet make no direct use of them through life 
seems to be an enormous waste, a pitiful misap- 
plication of energy. The culture value of linguis- 
tic studies must be large, indeed, to justify such 
expenditure and such results — the more so as all 
the greatest works have been translated, and to 

the average college graduate the translation mani- 
11 



163 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

festly gives more thought and more charm than 
does the original. 

Moreover, these great languages and all that 
they embody of profound thought and of linguis- 
tic charm are themselves the products of peoples 
who, for the most part, knew no tongue but their 
own. Was that limitation one factor in produc- 
ing the excellence which we moderns praise? 
What would be lost from modern culture if Greek 
and Latin were dropped entirely from our second- 
ary schools and retained in colleges as specialties, 
on a par with Sanscrit and Hebrew, and the time 
now given to them occupied in minute studies of 
the social life, art, and literature of those peoples, 
and in a more thorough acquaintance w T ith mod- 
ern languages ? 

The fact that Latin and Greek have survived 
through so many centuries and that still so many 
students choose them is unaccounted for. Fash- 
ion in education can hardly be so great a tyrant. 
If there be something in the nature of man, in the 
qualities of these languages, and in the discipli- 
nary value of such intimate, long-continued con- 
tact with those qualities, which justifies the reten- 
tion of their present importance in our schools, 
let them be begun in childhood, and pursued in 
such a manner that they shall become vital, per- 
manent possessions. 

For want of possession of knowledge adequate 
to such an undertaking — for the knowledge pos- 
sessed opportunity for experimentation could have 
been found or made — the writer has been able to 
dream onlv of what mi^ht be done in the teach- 



LANGUAGE 163 

ing of languages ; and this dream has always in- 
cluded the beginning, before the twelfth year, of 
five languages — English, German, French, Latin, 
and Greek. 

Begin in the kindergarten with the child's 
mother-tongue, soon introduce one foreign tongue, 
and others at intervals of one or two years. At 
the beginning of each new language, by aid of 
maps, models, sculpture, pictures, etc., fill the 
child's mind as much as possible with pictures of 
the life and environment of the people whose ex- 
pressions they are to learn. Then let a sentence 
whose ideas have interesting associations to the 
children be spoken and written in all the languages 
thus far learned ; and to these should be added 
its oral and written expression in the new tongue. 
Thus slowly, step by step, use what has been al- 
ready acquired, and add the new expressions, 
until the child uses one language as easily as 
another, and possesses a fair command of the 
iive. 

A class of children taught in this manner would 
travel the earth over in learning to read ; for in 
addition to what has been suggested, the wan- 
derings, colonial settlements, and historical move- 
ment of these peoples should be given bit by bit, 
in fresh narratives week by week. 

As familiarity grew, the five school -days of 
the week could be each given to one language, and 
all work for that day conducted in that tongue. 
The daily lessons would be the same, but teacher 
and children would for that day be Greeks, Ro- 
mans, Germans, French, or English ; so should 



164 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

they become in speech citizens, in a narrow sense, 
of the whole world, both in time and space. 

That no teacher knows enough to teach lan- 
guage in this manner is nothing against the ideal 
worth of the plan. A demand would create a sup- 
ply ; and a demand can come only from an intel- 
ligent understanding of the values of linguistic 
studies, and of the best means by which to real- 
ize those values with the minimum of effort and a 
maximum result to the child. 

In all use of language care should be taken that 
a child neither hear nor see error, and discrimina- 
tive criticism should not be asked until the stu- 
dent's own usage approximates excellence. The 
aim should be to form in the child's consciousness 
a standard of £K>od usa^e that is so fixed and in- 
corruptible that he is unconscious of it, save when 
violations of it occur outside himself and jar on 
his sensibilities. 

This is meant to include what is essential to a 
fair degree of accuracy and charm in spoken and 
written speech — delicate enunciation in sound, 
length of syllables, and accent ; correct idiomatic 
and syntactical forms; quick perception in choice 
of the meanings of words and phrases; felicity in 
the arrangement of words, phrases, and sentences, 
and of grouping in paragraphs ; spelling, use of 
capitals, and punctuation. 

During the first school years the child should 
imbibe these excellences unconsciously — learning 
correct usage as he learns to speak, read, and 
write a given tongue, because he has in the school- 
room no acquaintance with incorrect usage. 



LANGUAGE 165 

To give a child the permanent possession of 
right standards and measures of value is the chief 
concern ; not to have him make use of such as 
he can temporarily grasp and hesitatingly apply. 
He has before him a lifetime of application ; his 
first need is firm possession of the thing to be 
applied — a personal, unconscious habit of good 
usage. 

Good usage in language rests upon good usage 
in thought. Accurate, clear-cut, finished, logical, 
and well-arranged thought should be the aim in 
all departments of study ; and in proportion as 
this aim is realized will the habit of good usage 
in any language be more easily acquired. Finish 
in thought insures that a child use what vocabu- 
lary he has to its best advantage ; and by listen- 
ing to a child when at play, a teacher can soon 
determine whether habitual faulty speech in the 
class-room comes from faulty thought or from ig- 
norance of words and their uses. If the latter, 
the correction is of the form, not of the vital es- 
sence of language. 

Each language must express some variation in 
human thought, some change in mental functions. 
Suppose, for instance, that an inflected tongue 
represents a phase when the relation is not de- 
tached from the thing related, either in time or 
space ; and that one not inflected marks an ex- 
treme of individuality of ideas, a greater analytic 
power, where detachment and isolation are ex- 
treme. 

If the differentiating characteristics in the men- 
tal functions or thought processes of a given peo- 



166 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

pie could bo determined and isolated so that they 
could be intelligently grasped by a student, and 
by effort he could learn to take them on as his 
own, the learning of the language of that people 
— to an adult, surely — would be a comparatively 
easy task. 



MATHEMATICS 

Mathematical ideas and principles are compar- 
atively few and easy of understanding, while the 
computations which may be based upon them are 
numberless and often exceedingly complex, va- 
ried, and tedious. It is the former — the ideas and 
principles — which teachers should aim to give to 
children, rather than facility in the solving of puz- 
zles and in rapid computation. 

Rapid computation is required in certain occu- 
pations ; but when a youth enters on such an oc- 
cupation he can acquire this skill, just as he can 
and does any other purely technical facility which 
the majority of men neither possess nor need. 

The mathematical ideas and principles which 
can be grasped and intelligently comprehended 
at any given school age are, compared with those 
which may be taken from almost any other study, 
very few ; hence, small as is the actual bulk of 
all known mathematical ideas and principles, the 
study must extend over the entire school life, 
from kindergarten to the highest graduate work. 

What the average child's mind can grasp and 
intelligently use of mathematical ideas and prin- 
ciples before the age of fourteen can be taught to 



168 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

him in a single year; and all that he is able to 
understand — the average student is meant — from 
fourteen to college age in another year. 

The average of persons who are at once thought- 
ful and intelligent will probably find, on reflec- 
tion, that they manipulated mathematical proc- 
esses in school long before they had an intelli- 
gent grasp of the real meanings underlying those 
processes ; and no matter how carefully and ob- 
jectively those processes were explained or " de- 
veloped " step by step, the actual comprehension 
eluded the mental grasp, and there remained in 
the mind the husk only of facility in manipula- 
tion. 

A baby's hand fails to grasp what a well-grown 
hand can completely cover; so there are mathe- 
matical ideas usually taught in primary grades 
which the average mind cannot grasp before the 
age of fourteen. 

This is, perhaps, the chief reason why the re- 
sults of mathematical studies in our schools are 
so out of proportion to the time and effort spent 
upon them. Every teacher of children knows that 
mathematical ideas fall away from the child's 
memory very fast, and can be kept there at all 
only by constant repetition and illustration in 
manipulating processes. This of itself is suffi- 
cient to show the inability of the mind to incor- 
porate the ideas as integral parts of its permanent 
furnishing. 

The average mind learns a mathematical proc- 
ess with extreme quickness when so far developed 
as to easily and quickly grasp the idens and prin- 



MATHEMATICS 169 

ciples that arc involved in the process ; and the 
time now spent in schools on processes whose 
principles cannot yet be comprehended is mostly 
sheer waste. 

To stop this waste is the duty of every one who 
has interest in the preservation and development 
of a sound nervous system in a child ; for there is 
no more nagging, nerve-destroying thing than to 
be obliged, day after day, to do mental work that 
has no meaning and presumably leaves no result 
in the actual enlargement and modification of 
nerve substance. 

To set an adult to learning Greek, Hebrew, or 
Sanscrit without allowing him to know the mean- 
ing of the words, and insist that he shall remem- 
ber the proper order, arrangement, and inflection 
of the words so well that, given a jumble or puz- 
zle of words, he shall be able to make a complete 
and intelligent sentence, and yet not know the 
meaning of it when made — this would be some- 
what analogous to and but little more unreason- 
able than what children are often set to doing: in 
mathematics through all the grades of our schools. 

Not only the ideas and principles, but the proc- 
esses which the majority of children have occa- 
sion to use before the age of fourteen can be 
taught in the one year ; and all combinations of 
those processes which are likely to arise in actual 
experience out of school and in other studies could 
be taught in probably one month of each other 
school year. 

If a few things were well clone in a short time, 
and the child left thereafter to such mathematical 



170 AN" EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

experiences as arise in other studies and in his 
outside life, the child would have not only all the 
mathematics he would need or use, but a large 
amount of school time and mental energy to be 
spent on other studies. 

That many children leave school early does not 
change the matter, save to make the case still 
worse against present practice ; for what is not 
comprehended drops away, and the child's school 
time, so short, so precious, has been wasted, and 
hje defrauded of other knowledge which he might 
have gained and kept. 

If the average adult will examine and set down 
the mathematical ideas and processes which he 
uses from year's end to year's end, he will be sur- 
prised to find them nothing more, ordinarily, than 
amplifications of what can be taught in the first 
primary year (see Part I., Chapter I., page 4) ; 
and the exceptions that arise in ten years could 
be learned in a single week, so that the child who 
leaves school before the age of fourteen would not 
usually need to blush for mathematical ignorance 
if taught no more than is suggested for that } T ear, 
provided that he had sufficient, recurrent practice 
not to forget. 

It is not meant to imply that mathematics have 
no culture value, but that their culture value can 
be realized best when the mind is able to assimi- 
late and appreciate them ; that present practice 
harms every child by diverting his time and ener- 
gies from culture that he can assimilate ; and that 
this loss falls most heavily on the child who leaves 
school early. 



MATHEMATICS 171 

Educators have agreed to banish the old spell- 
ing-books, with their lists of long, difficult, and 
technical words ; perhaps future educators will 
banish to the same limbo the present arithmetics, 
and for similar reasons. 

This book recommends : that mathematics be 
taught as a subject of study at long intervals 
only, through all the years up to college age ; 
that during the intervals it shall come up for use 
or discussion when needed in other studies only, 
and then only so far as needed; that stress shall 
be laid on ideas and principles rather than on 
processes ; that such processes only shall be taught 
as are likely to be required in the child's daily ex- 
periences, and shall not involve numbers or com- 
plex conditions much beyond what such experiences 
are likely to be. Technical, trade, and business 
schools would need to do more work in mathe- 
matics ; but in them the same principles might be 
followed of confining the extent and complexity 
of the work to the actual requirements of the oc- 
cupations pursued, until the student's mind had, 
through other studies and contact with life, de- 
veloped beyond the point of merely grasping and 
holding a process for temporary use to the point 
of intelligent assimilation of the ideas and princi- 
ples involved. 

Every child is a natural symbolist — a corn-cob 
with a dress on it will do for a baby, and a stick 
with no additions for a horse. To let one thing 
stand for another is as easy to a child as to 
breathe. Advantage of this can be taken to teach 
comprehensive formula?. a-\-h — c should be the 



172 AK EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

child's general expression for addition from the 
first primary year. Moreover, he more easily 
grasps the general idea of putting together than 
he works out the details of a special case. Give 
him a-^-h — c as an expression of putting together 
in one mass what had been before in two or more 
masses of the same stuff, and, when a special case 
comes up, teach him to put the given details in 
proper succession under the letters of this for- 
mula, using the formula at each combination of 
two masses until the whole are added, how many- 
soever there be. In a short time, by this means 
alone, there will be formed in his mind an ine- 
radicable impression of the distinction between a 
general conception and a particular case. 

As easily may he be taught to distinguish the 
ideas of known and unknown quantities, and des- 
ignate them as such in the simplest processes. In 
scientific studies he will early come in contact 
with the ideas of constant and variable, continu- 
ous and discontinuous, and of limit. In industrial 
work, greater, less, equal, and equivalent will have 
continual illustration. All the axioms used or il- 
lustrated in elementary mathematics can be easily 
taught in a living concrete way in connection with 
industrial work. Opportunities are abundant — 
at least, would be in an ideal school — of teaching 
by contact with actual phenomena every mathe- 
matical idea and principle required to enter upon 
college studies — more than the average freshman 
has — without the child's knowing he is study- 
ing mathematics, simply by bringing out the full 
meaning of the phenomena when an opportunity 



MATHEMATICS 173 

presents itself, and then giving the child, what- 
ever his age, the mathematician's terms and for- 
mulae for that meaning. 

Children are perpetually basing their plays on 
hypotheses. They say, " Let us play that it is so 
and so " ; and having settled the limits of their 
assumption, they proceed to work out details ac- 
cording to it. This shows how easily they can 
grasp the distinction between an assumption and 
a fact ; and how readily they could be led to ap- 
preciate the notion of a working hypothesis, and 
of the limitations which it imposes. 

To make early use of such native possibilities 
by turning them to account in school studies 
would lay foundations of clear distinctions that 
are sometimes hard to attain in later life, and 
would be a gift to any mind of immensely greater 
value than quick facility in mathematical compu- 
tations. 

The arbitrary character of all symbols may be 
impressed by leading the child to construct a ci- 
pher alphabet and digits. Let each child con- 
struct one for himself, write sentences, and make 
computations. Show him how business men in 
all shops mark their wares. A little work in this 
line will emancipate the child's mind from bond- 
age to symbols, and help to form the habit of 
seeking real meanings, and of regarding all sym- 
bols as merely convenient devices for using, con- 
veying, and manipulating meanings. 

Factoring is easy of comprehension, and from 
it to the involution and evolution of roots is a 
short step. Confined to easy numbers and simple 



174 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

processes, these can be given early, and should, 
from the first, be associated with appropriate 
symbols and technical terms. 

The characteristics of some curves, the plotting 
and drawing of them and their use in science, 
could be taught even in the first primary year; 
then how much more easily when an occasion in 
other studies makes their understanding and use 
desirable ! 

It should be borne in mind that all higher prob- 
lems are made up of simpler elements ; that these 
elements rest upon still simpler ideas and princi- 
ples ; and that these fundamental ideas and prin- 
ciples can be separately grasped by a child and 
made part of the permanent stuff of his mind long 
before he can hold in the focus of consciousness 
the combination of elements, formulae, processes, 
and abstract conceptions necessary to the manipu- 
lation and solution of complex problems. That 
which a child can take through natural associa- 
tions with his experiences in life or in other stud- 
ies, give him freely at any age ; but do not waste 
his years and energies on processes of calculation, 
or in trying to instil complexities which the focus 
of his consciousness will not cover. 

This chapter is not meant to be anything more 
than suggestive ; for its ideas have not been test- 
ed by experiment in the school-room by the writer 
beyond what is narrated in Part I., pages 16-21. 



VI 
INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 

An ideal school might be a world in miniature, 
where all occupations which are essential to the 
comfort and beauty of man's existence are repre- 
sented on a scale that is appropriate to the age of 
the children to be taught. 

Handicraft brings about the co-ordination of 
all the senses of man, and that co-ordination is 
complete only when great skill has been reached. 
Complete co-ordination in one form of skill gives 
no assurance of appreciable co-ordination in an- 
other ; so that to reach the co-ordinations which 
are possible to man at present he should practise 
as many handicrafts as possible. 

Man develops individually along the lines of 
the general need, and, save in the rare instances 
of advance to another level, he has no other means 
of development. 

The co-ordination of the senses into one act 
means the gathering into one focus of many ave- 
nues of stimulation, and the power to control and 
to use that focus effectively when formed. 

Modern psychology seems to tend to the notion 
that mental processes, even to the most abstract 
thought, depend upon physical processes, upon the 



176 AK EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

happy combination of certain groups of nerves 
and muscles. Whatever of truth there is in this 
notion tends to confirm the necessity of industrial 
training for all students from childhood up ; for 
the co-ordination of the senses into one act of 
skill means the delicate adjustment and balance 
of many nerves and muscles. To give a child ac- 
tivities where not only such adjustments must be 
made, but where the least flaw in the adjustment 
expresses itself at once in the result, would de- 
velop the capacity to make approximately flawless 
adjustments. The child himself cannot fail to see 
the flaw, and in the effort to remove or overcome 
it the habit of the flawless adjustment is made. 

Such results as this, in the co-ordinate activities 
of nerves and muscles, can be at present gained 
in no way so quickly or surely as in the various 
handicrafts ; and, if the psychologists are even 
one-half right, the gaining of skill in handicraft is 
certainly an aid and may be an essential step in 
true processes of thought. 

Certain it is that our scientists are our most 
exact thinkers ; and they, one and all, must, to 
reach eminence in their fields, have acquired very 
great skill in at least one sort of physical manip- 
ulation. 

If these ideas seem far-fetched, let the reader 
reflect that no one is without some handicraft 
skill, some power to co-ordinate nerves and mus- 
cles into an approximately perfect act. The care 
of the person requires it ; the act of writing is a 
very delicate adjustment of this sort. 

Whether the average man performs enough of 



INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 177 

such acts, or has from childhood acquired enough 
co-ordinations to account for all the thinking of 
which he is capable, is a question which need not 
concern us here. Certain it is that the average 
man's thought is not skilful ; it partakes, usual- 
ly, of the uncertain, slovenly, haphazard qualities 
which characterize untrained physical movements. 
He cannot be depended upon to make a focus in 
his consciousness of all the knowledge which he 
has and ought reasonably to be expected to bring 
to bear on the given point or question before his 
mind. 

Take another point of view — that of another 
school of psychologists. Suppose the physical be- 
ing of man stands between its exterior environ- 
ment and a soul or entity who is independent 
of it in existence, but dependent upon it for ex- 
pression of itself in our common life ; and that 
stimulation and co-ordination of nerves and mus- 
cles may arise from within — that is, be initiated 
by and from the soul — as well as from without 
or the environment. Suppose, further, that the 
co-ordinations which arise from stimulations from 
either source are always at first adjusted — that 
is, determined — by the soul. It would be to the 
advantage of such an entity to have as many co- 
ordinations as possible established in the perma- 
nent structure of the physical organism, so that 
its attention could be given mainly to the general 
movement of the thought or of the physical ac- 
tivity, without dissipation in the small details 
of that movement; and since man's sense organs 
are a part of the mechanism which such a soul 

12 



178 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

uses, activities whose co-ordinations depend di- 
rectly on those organs must necessarily aid the 
formation of habits of flawless co-ordination. 

From almost any point of view, handicraft 
stands out as essential to the complete develop- 
ment of the mind of man ; and for such develop- 
ment the range of activities in handicraft can 
hardly be too wide or too varied, so long as each 
is pursued to the point of skill. 

This mental effect involves a moral effect. 
Most of the lies and deceit in the world come 
from slovenly thinking, and most mistakes, too, 
can usually be traced to the same source. To 
focus the whole mind to one given point, and 
to hold that focus in consciousness until ail the 
threads of knowledge and of experience that are 
combined in that focus have each had its due 
effect — this is attained by the few wise only. 
Most men act now from one impulse, now from 
another, rarely from the whole being or with the 
consciousness and consent of the whole. 

To make the various handicrafts integral parts 
of every school, so that the student from the kin- 
dergarten up shall be as familiar with tools as 
with books, and turn out articles in physical sub- 
stance as often as he does compositions — this 
would inevitably work a change in our social 
structure. 

Scorn of manual labor would give place to re- 
spect for that labor, and personal skill in the gift- 
ed and well-to-do would elevate the standards of 
such labor. The physical laborer would take his 
rightful place as an integral and equally honored 



INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 179 

part of the social whole with his brother, the 
mental laborer ; and to neither would be denied 
the privilege of sharing the other's tasks. 

The present division of society into the manual 
laborer and the non-manual laborer, with all the 
social consequences thereof, is mainly artificial. 
Many an idler, mental dabbler, and professional 
man has locked within him special aptitude for 
taste and skill in handicraft ; but should he leave 
his present occupation, or lack of occupation, to 
give those aptitudes the severe training which 
alone brings skill, and then exercise that skill as 
common laborers do, he would suffer degradation 
in the social eyes of even fair-minded and other- 
wise sensible people. 

There are always reasons even for the seeming 
vagaries of the social consciousness ; and it is true 
that supreme skill or excellence is usually recog- 
nized and honored by the highest social thought 
in our own land. Perhaps the past and present 
attitudes towards physical labor have been neces- 
sary to keep skill from settling into mediocrity, 
and to force on it perpetual change and growth ; 
but the notion that he who reaches less than a 
supreme skill, or uses skill for gain in the ordinary 
markets, is disgraced and not ennobled by his skill 
may have paralyzed the natural bent of a good 
many men and women, and made useless or medi- 
ocre social units that might have been otherwise. 

On the other hand, the limitation of nearly all 
forms of mechanical labor to the poor, and the 
social conditions that force them to follow such 
labor from childhood or starve, are responsible for 



180 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

choking in the poor whatever riches of mental ap- 
titudes they possess. 

An education which includes both the mental 
and the physical, and gives to each child, regard- 
less of his present wealth or prospects of wealth, as 
much skill in forms of manual labor as in the va- 
rious branches of the present studies — this would, 
in time, do something towards making the dis- 
tinctions between the manual and the mental la- 
borers natural, the outgrowth of inherent apti- 
tudes, instead of, as at present, the accident of 
birth or of opportunity. Society would then have 
the products of all her native capacities turned to 
their best uses, and be a gainer thereby ; for the 
present usage wastes power at both ends of the 
social line, and all along the line. 

The cause of present practice in this matter is 
deep — it is the measure of worth which the uni- 
versal consciousness recognizes as worth. That 
measure should be being ; and it seems thus far 
to have been, and to now be, doing and having. 
Perhaps this is because man has been, thus far 
in known human history, so absorbed in gather- 
ing from and subduing his environment that he 
has had little leisure to think of that which gath- 
ers and subdues. Yet the fact that doing in ma- 
terial substance is dishonored in the bulk is a rec- 
ognition that something is more honorable : and 
when man has taken the further step of dis- 
honoring the having of material substance, and 
riches are relegated to the mentally poor, he will 
have reached the point of discerning being as 
apart from doing and having— -being, the one 



INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 181 

thing which a man brings to and may take from 
his brief term of physical existence as we now 
know it. 

Before the age of twelve no child should be set 
to work at any handicraft that requires minute 
inspection of or attention to small points of de- 
tail. All forms of needlework (except, perhaps, 
that on the old-fashioned cardboard with large 
holes and wide spaces), most wood-carving, and 
much modelling are objectionable on this account. 
Work with glazed papers and with metals, espe- 
cially hammered work in brass, is objectionable 
because of the glare of light from the materials ; 
and for a similar reason materials in strongly 
pronounced colors should be avoided. 

The eye is a very delicate instrument, and its 
development cannot be too carefully guarded 
from arrest or ruin. All work that is given to 
children before the age of twelve should be as 
large as the child's size and strength will bear, 
and should involve no detail which may not be 
easily seen and its accuracy estimated at a min- 
imum distance of eighteen inches from the eye ; 
and at that distance there should be no effort to 
hold the focus of the eyes long on a minute point. 
Let the detail to which attention is given, aside 
from the one detail of accurate measurement, be 
as large as possible. 

The softer woods and clay, being neutral in 
color, are the best materials for beginning lessons 
in handicraft ; and abundant work in these ma- 
terials can be arranged which will give the de- 
sired results to physical and mental development 



182 AN" EXPERIMENT IN" EDUCATION" 

without harm to any organ of the child's body, 
or to his mind through disgust with minute and 
wearisome detail. 

Moreover, the imperfect result of a false or in- 
complete co-ordination of nerves and muscles in a 
given act should be so large that the flaw cannot 
escape the child's own observation. The defect 
which a child sees plainly he can summon cour- 
age enough to remedy or overcome by repeated 
effort, while a minute detail, which a trained or 
fastidious eye alone sees, soon exhausts his pa- 
tience. When a child has become sensitive to 
imperfection in large details, and conscious of 
power to make such details perfect, it is easy to 
gradually lead to such sensitiveness and conscious 
power through gradation down to the greatest 
minutiaa which the most exacting craft requires. 
But in this process the eye should not be forgot- 
ten, and every child should be protected against 
conscious and unconscious harm to it. 

Household labor, such as cooking, dish-washing, 
the laying and serving of meals, dusting, arrang- 
ing furniture and ornaments, washing and iron- 
ing, afford excellent opportunities for developing 
a sensitiveness to that skill which is complete 
only when its results are both fit — that is, adapt- 
ed to the purpose — and beautiful, or satisfying to 
the aesthetic feelings. 

Gardening and horticulture appeal to another 
side of the nature, or rather to the same qualities 
from different points of view, and have the fur- 
ther advantage that they take the child out of 
doors. In this labor the child becomes a partner 



INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 183 

with the planet, and must wait that partner's 
movements and learn to work according to uni- 
versal laws. 

Industrial work of various sorts, if properly ar- 
ranged, could be followed throughout each school 
year without taking anything from the results in 
the usual studies ; for such labors are so great 
a delight to the child, and their effects on the 
mind are so beneficial, that a continuous course in 
industrial work seems to help the child to carry 
and assimilate the full burden of mental pursuits 
with a less expenditure of time and energy than 
is ordinarily given to them. This may be be- 
cause of the help which industrial work gives to 
the power to co-ordinate nerve and muscle into 
complete accord in movement, and so brings the 
mind into easy mental action more quickly than 
any exclusively mental processes can. 

A child desires to accomplish something the 
effects of which he can plainly see. ISTo purely 
mental pursuit allows the child the full satisfac- 
tion of this natural and just demand. The handi- 
crafts do this at every step. 

Every child has a kind of integrity which 
would prefer to deal with real things instead 
of with imaginary ones if he could ; to be a real 
force that makes, creates, and helps along the 
necessary work of the world. Industrial training 
can be made to foster and to train this desirable 
quality, through so arranging the work that its 
final results shall be of some use to the child, by 
satisfying some necessity at school or home, either 
for himself or another ; and let the child plainly 



184 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

sec that every step of the process is essential to 
that final result. This will give a tangible aim 
and a reasonable worth to his effort, both of 
which be can appreciate. 

Life has dignity and self-respect in the individ- 
ual in proportion to the individual's discernment 
of his use to the social whole. It is desirable 
to foster the sources of dignity and self-respect 
from babyhood upward, and for the average 
child it is doubtful if there are other means of 
doing this so efficient as industrial education ; for 
if the man may not reach usefulness in other 
lines, lie certainly may in some handicraft. Skill 
in handicraft thus furnishes something to fall 
back upon ; not to replenish a depleted purse or 
a ruined bank-account, but an empty self-respect 
and an exhausted worth. 

Since tin; main object of all industrial training, 
from the standpoint of the writer, is the perfect 
co-ordination of nerves and muscles into an effec- 
tive act, it follows that perfect results at each step 
can alone guarantee that that object has been re- 
alized. This necessitates that the work move 
along slowly, with repetitions of a detail until 
that, detail is complete; and requires that each 
individual work and progress without regard to 
other individuals. This requirement is of itself a 
source of mental and moral power to the child; 
for it requires him to exercise mental and moral 
effort for reasons that he appreciates. 

The exercise of a sympathy which would help 
a child by doing his work or by glossing over his 
mistakes, in order that the results of his activities 



INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 185 

may keep pace with those of some other child, de- 
bases the mind and heart of the child. It teaches 
him to lie consciously and to ignore the fact that 
he has done so, or makes him content with his in- 
feriority. 

Not to do so much as another, or so rapidly, 
but so perfectly, so beautifully, should be the de- 
sire which is to be instilled into a child's heart. The 
time will come when he must know that he can- 
not always satisfy this desire; but that knowledge 
should be kept as far off as possible. At least, it 
should not be allowed to invade those formative 
years when no teacher or parent can tell what 
powers are within the child. Slow and painful 
development often brings a sure and lovely result ; 
and to each child should be given the benefit of 
all doubt about so grave a matter as his own 
future possibilities. 



VII 
MEANS OF EXPRESSION 

Reading and writing should be regarded not as 
ends in themselves, but as means of expression; 
and they should be so presented to the child that 
he would so regard and so use them from the first 
day in school. 

When a child has command of the movements 
of hand and arm which are required in a smooth 
and well-formed handwriting, and such a mental 
impression of accuracy and elegance in the forms 
of letters and of their combinations in words that 
he can be trusted not to forget those forms and 
combinations, he may be allowed to vary from 
them to accord with his own taste and nature; 
but originality should not be allowed to become 
a cloak for slovenliness. An illegible handwriting 
should be as great a disgrace as indistinct speech. 
To take time and pains to form and to finish letters 
as carefully in writing as sounds in speech is cer- 
tainly no more than good manners require.; and 
yet men of this generation have for the most part 
a wretched chirography, with no merits to justify 
its ugliness, and no real necessities to excuse the 
careless haste with which it is indulged. 

Speech is not much better, save in restricted 



MEANS OF EXPRESSION 187 

circles, and a good reader is rare in any circle. A 
habit of clear, delicate, and discriminating enun- 
ciation and of an agreeable intonation is one of 
the loveliest gifts which a teacher can bestow 
upon a child. This habit can be formed in the 
average child by daily 1 - repeated vocal drill con- 
tinued through all the school years ; and, so far 
as the writer knows, in no other way. 

The study of foreign languages helps in this, 
because such study stimulates attention to fine 
and subtle discriminations in sound. Music helps 
too, and is invaluable in bringing out and perfect- 
ing the native timbre and possible delicacies of 
intonation. But only practice in the elegant use 
of one's own tongue, in speech and oral reading, 
will suffice for the formation and perfection of 
such a habit. 

Here, as elsewhere, it is the habit of good usage 
that must be relied on, and not critical power in 
details of faulty usage. 

Free outline drawing should be as common as 
writing, and as easily handled for uses of expres- 
sion. This also requires care, drill, and long-con- 
tinued use, from kindergarten up through all the 
grades ; and this use should come as a natural ne- 
cessity, in connection with the other studies, just 
as reading and writing do. 

Exercises in reading, writing, and drawing are 
often so disassociated from one another, and from 
other studies, that they seem to have no vital re- 
lations to thought or to any needs and desires of 
the child. To regard them as necessary instru- 
ments for his own service and delight is the first 



188 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

thought which a child should have about them ; 
and that service and delight should not be lost 
siffht of bv teacher or child, even in the most ex- 
acting drill. 'Not that the drill must be delight- 
ful — it certainly should not be painful — but that 
the child should recognize it as required by his 
awkward inefficiency, in order that he may reach 
the power and possibilities of delight. 

The ancient Greeks thought music to have great 
educational value, as a means of expression and 
as a source of intellectual and of ethical culture. 
Music is often spoken of now as having these val- 
ues ; but there are comparatively few who do not 
in their practices belie these professions. Even 
to those who follow it as a profession it seems to 
be treated, for the most part, as an ornament and 
an amusement. 

On public occasions the music rendered has 
often no relation or fitness to the surroundings, 
the persons engaged, or the dignity and worth of 
the occasion ; is rather an opportunity to show off 
a voice or technical skill, and, as such, is an intru- 
sion and a jar. 

In too many churches and Sunday and day 
schools throughout our land the so-called music 
is often noise and jingle which expresses nothing 
but the barbarism of those who endure it and 
seem to regard it as an expression of praise, wor- 
ship, or other fine sentiment. Are not those who 
think any fine combination of sounds can worthily 
fit any occasion also far from the mark ? 

There is nothing more enjoyable or expressive 
than fit music fitly rendered ; and by fit is meant 



MEANS OF EXPRESSION" 189 

suitable to the occasion, whatever that may be. 
Music should be to condition and circumstance 
what words are to ideas, whether the condition 
and circumstance are primarily from within, as 
when a person sings or plays to himself, or from 
without, as when he performs for others ; and this 
fitness should be in the kind and quality of the 
music, as well as in the excellence of the per- 
formance. 

The intuitions of humanity do not so often err 
in these matters as do the musicians and the pro- 
fessional composers. Men use what is provided, 
and follow the fashions in vogue in their environ- 
ments in music as in dress — that is, men use the 
jingles that they know rather than the nobler 
music which they have capacity to enjoy but have 
never heard. 

To the public schools must men turn to get this 
great want developed and provided for; and not 
until music is as common and relatively as excel- 
lent in our public schools as are reading and writ- 
ing will the thing be accomplished, and music take 
its place as an integral part of human life, an es- 
sential means of expression and interpretation of 
man to himself and to his fellows. 

The miracles of music have not been wrought 
by its own power alone. With the Greeks, mu- 
sic as a department of study included poetic lit- 
erature. Music and literature, in our restricted 
meanings of these terms, to the Greeks were in- 
separably associated. It was speech wedded to 
music that in the songs of Tyrtaeus led the Spar- 
tans to victory. 



190 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

The common man needs to know what his 
sounds mean, in order to have the effect of them 
definitely directed ; and when that meaning comes 
in words that stir his blood, and the music fits the 
words, the combined effect makes it easy for that 
same common man to dare and to do nobly, even 
unto death. 

Music alone ma}^ produce its full effects on the 
few who are especially sensitive and cultivated, 
but the average person of all ages and conditions 
requires for these full effects that suitable words 
be attached to music as that ideas should be at- 
tached to speech ; and when either speech or mu- 
sic is not thus joined to its proper complement 
its power is weakened, changed, or altogether de- 
stroyed. 

This makes the literature of music as important 
as the music itself, in order that indelible asso- 
ciations between noble sounds and noble senti- 
ments shall be wrought into the child mind. Of 
all the literature associated with music, how much 
is worthy to live as literature ? Too often, on a 
great occasion, when thousands are gathered, are 
all the resources of musical art in fine instruments 
and famous singers employed to sing literature so 
unworthy that a street gamin would blush to be 
thought capable of admiring it. 

Is not this — in part, at least — because men have 
lost sight of the functions of music as a means 
of expression, and imagine that to the common 
mind it can be a matter of supreme indiffer- 
ence what the words are — whether in a known 
or unknown tongue ; do, re, mi ; hi diddle, did- 



MEAKS OF EXPBESSION 191 

die; or some utterly mawkish or sensual senti- 
ment ? 

Of all nations, we of the English-speaking peo- 
ples are most inexcusable for this degradation of 
song by unworthy associations. There is need of 
a reformer to do for our song world what Wagner 
did for the opera — to lift it to a higher level, and 
to consider as carefully what is to be expressed as 
how. 

Such reform to be lasting must be founded in 
our public schools, and in them must great litera- 
ture and great melodies be associated ; and when 
from cradle up a generation of men have listened 
to and sung such songs, there will, perhaps, be 
an increase of that quality of living which a man 
need not be ashamed of. 

Modelling, sculpture, painting, and all handi- 
crafts are means of expression, and are so used to 
some extent. Doubtless machinery has repressed 
the creative and expressive instinct a good deal; 
but when man as a whole has become the master 
and is no longer the slave of his machine, what- 
ever powers have been buried in factories and 
mills will find their resurrection. For it may be 
presumed that nature is not wholly dependent on 
the individual; having failed of one outlet, she 
can doubtless make another. 

An ideal school would give ample opportunity 
for creative talent and for any other form of self- 
expression of which a given child is capable ; but 
in schools as they are a little is done along these 
lines, and more can be. 

It remains to speak of physical culture as a 



192 AX EXPERIMENT IX EDUCATION 

means of expression. Developing the body to its 
utmost capacity for health and strength does not 
necessarily make it an adequate instrument for 
self-expression. It is not to be supposed that nat- 
ure has no misfits, and that a healthful adjust- 
ment of the physical, vital forces is all that is re- 
quired for the ease and comfort of the body's 
tenant. Rather is it more probable that every 
body is, to some extent, a misfit, and that many 
souls go about like princes in tatters or in some- 
body else's clothes. Certain it is that rare are 
the hours, to most of us, when the body perfectly 
renders the inward thought and condition. It is 
a stolid thing of nerves and muscles, responding 
slowly and uncertainly to the swiftly flowing and 
transforming moods of the soul. 

To make it somewhat less stolid and more re- 
sponsive should be the aim of the teacher of little 
children. Natural ease and expressive grace of 
posture and movement are often seen in children, 
but more rarely in adults. To preserve the na- 
tive ease and grace, to develop and add to them, 
and to bring them into conscious possession with 
the meanings which they convey — this should be 
done; and something towards it may be done in 
every school-room in our land. 

Let children try to give soundless expression to 
their ideas, both of intellection and of emotion, 
until they are quick at pantomime and quick at 
reading the meanings of the pantomimic efforts of 
others. At first, give them the aid of objects; 
later, require the expression to be completed by 
their own bodies alone, until they handle their 



MEANS OF EXPRESSION 19o 

bodies with the same ready precision to express 
an idea that they do words to form sentences for 
such expression. 

In the present state of knowledge about the 
body as a means of expression, care must be ex- 
ercised lest stereotyped forms are taught. A 
teacher's best models, provided he cannot himself 
have the instruction of a competent master, are 
children at their games and men and women in 
unconscious action. A habit of observation, sup- 
plemented by effort to reproduce in one's person 
what has been observed, will soon give a teacher 
much material for these exercises and a fair degree 
of critical judgment. 

It may be asked of what use are these exer- 
cises and accomplishments when habits have been 
formed. Surely anything which makes a man 
master of his body as a means of expression has 
put a valuable power in his possession. Further- 
more, it is urged by teachers of physical culture 
that all exercises react upon the inner self ; so 
that to take a noble posture is to receive a stimu- 
lus to noble feeling and thought as truly as to read 
a noble sentiment. In so far as posture is or can 
be an exact expression of thought this may be 
true, whether a child be able to analyze and un- 
derstand the stimulus and his reaction on it or not. 

A study of means of expression conducted ac- 
cording to scientific methods will form a habit 
of attention to and interest in those means, and 
such attention and interest must increase a man's 
knowledge of himself and of his neighbor,- than 
which few things are more desirable. 



194 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

Ultimately every man lives in solitude, and with 
difficulty does he imperfectly impart his own intel- 
lectual and emotional states to his neighbors or 
apprehend theirs. A man knows his own experi- 
ences, and he knows little more. The form, limits, 
and quality of his neighbor's thought he guesses 
at but does not know. He may try to repeat his 
neighbor's experience, but he cannot know wheth- 
er the repetition is exactly like the original or not. 
He forms judgments about his neighbor and acts 
upon those judgments ; but those judgments are 
based mainly not upon knowledge of his neigh- 
bor but of himself. The fact that he cannot lay 
a piece of his mind over a corresponding piece of 
his neighbor's mind and see how they fit ; cannot 
exactly experience his neighbor's experience, nei- 
ther in the small nor in the great — this fact should 
be brought to consciousness in every child ; and 
one way of doing it is through these exercises in 
expression, for the child will soon observe that 
the expressions and their interpretations are ap- 
proximations only, and never quite satisfactory to 
either party. 

Courage is the backbone of character, and so 
long as it is mainly gristle the character is not of 
much worth. To realize one's solitude and accept 
it, even as a child can do, is to begin to deposit 
bone in the gristle. To realize one's ignorance 
about one's neighbor, and to act sincerely from 
that realization, is to begin to stand upright. To 
do unto one's neighbor as one would wish one's 
neighbor to do unto him is to realize and do but 
half the truth. One's neighbor is not one's self ; 



MEANS OF EXPKESSION 195 

and one may find — nay, frequently does find — that 
his neighbor does not wish or need the same treat- 
ment that he himself does. One's neighbor some- 
times wishes and needs conduct towards him that 
one would not willingly receive from any one ; so 
that it is not alone what one wishes unto him- 
self in like circumstances, but what his neighbor 
also wishes, that should influence conduct towards 
one's neighbor. To have realized this fact is to 
have accepted both the solitude and the igno- 
rance. To act upon this acceptance requires a con- 
tinual study of one's neighbor — a looking outward 
for motives and forms of conduct as well as in- 
ward. 

This looking outward will avail only when what 
is seen is truly interpreted ; and here ngain most 
men are thrown back upon self, until, through 
many a knock for false interpretation, one is at 
last educated to a sort of understanding, at least 
to acceptance as fact, of that which one does not 
experience. 

When men are sufficiently developed it is to be 
hoped that they will not ask such hard tasks of 
one another, and perhaps then the " golden rule " 
alone will be a sufficient guide ; but it is not now, 
and it is the present which the child must be edu- 
cated up to. 

Do unto thyself what thy own nature approves 
and needs ; unto thy neighbor what his nature de- 
sires and needs. This is to be free, and to leave 
one's neighbor free. 

To do loathsome physical tasks for one's neigh- 
bor has long been regarded as a meritorious ac- 



196 AN EXPEKIMENT IN EDUCATION 

complishment ; to do as loathsome intellectual 
and ethical tasks — fully conscious that they are 
loathsome — is a height man has not aspired to 
consciously (save among the Jesuits, where it 
may be doubted whether the act was or is under- 
stood as here meant), although it has been reached 
by individuals here and there from time immemo- 
rial. Strangely enough, when these cases have 
been understood they have been regarded as 
proofs of a high degree of love ; and the hard 
righteousness that has let one's neighbor suffer 
rather than sin for him has not won universal ap- 
plause. 

A man's conscience is his measure, to be used in 
his own affairs as rigidly as he pleases; but it is 
sometimes injustice as well as " bad form " to 
force it on his neighbor, to that neighbor's dis- 
comfort and loss. Perhaps conscience is partly 
an intellectual and ethical fastidiousness, for it has 
changed from age to age quite as much as physical 
fastidiousness has ; and it would be well for chil- 
dren to get some inkling of this fact, and learn to 
regard his neighbor's conscience as possibly quite 
as respectable as his own. 

A man's self flows from the tip of his pen or 
fingers, or vibrates in the tones of his voice or the 
movements of his body, only when all means of 
expression have passed beyond the rudimentary 
stages of conveying thought merely, and have 
become vehicles of expression for the sum total 
of his understanding. 

It is this sum total which a man's gait, posture, 
and various physical movements should express, 



MEANS OF EXPRESSION 197 

but which they do express rarely. Judged from 
his conduct, man is not so much an entity as a 
combination of entities, all using the one body as 
a vehicle of action and expression ; and on supreme 
occasions only does there seem to be a focus or 
concentration of all the entities in one act. It is 
this which makes the expression of the self and 
the judgment of others so crude and inadequate 
until after long training of self and long and inti- 
mate acquaintance with another. 

The study and practice of the varjous means of 
expression will do something towards restrain- 
ing and refining both expressions and judgments, 
and so produce beneficial social and moral results 
through the formation of a habit of allowing* a 
man the benefit of all that he is, rather than of 
estimating him from one or two facets of his being. 

It is conceivable that this training might be car- 
ried so far that a person could take on at will his 
neighbor's forms of expression at any given mo- 
ment by adjustments of his own nerves and mus- 
cles, and, by noting the effect upon himself, make 
a shrewd guess about his neighbor's sensibilities 
and reactions at that moment. Even such facility 
could guess only ; for that which reacts in one's 
neighbor would still be unknown. 

What is desirable and to be sought in the aver- 
age child's development is not such skill, but a 
habit of trying to understand the meaning of his 
own nervo-muscular combinations, and of noting 
the quality and probable meaning of those which 
he sees in his neighbor. 

A man is not infrequently awkward because he 



198 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

has not learned a graceful way of doing the thing 
required, and not because his intention is awkward. 
Slowness of wits and lack of power over the body 
keep many a kind and gracious act from realiza- 
tion. Malicious or intentional unkindness or rude- 
ness is so rare that if we studied our neighbors 
instead of ourselves we should have small excuse 
for complaint. 

It is the habit of so understanding the meaning 
of, and possessing power of control over, the ex- 
pression of one's self as to select and use the most 
desirable expression in any given case, and of 
studying one's neighbor, and of trying to get at 
his real intention and his reasons for having that 
intention, which these exercises in means of ex- 
pression should have for ultimate aim, in order that 
the child may be prepared to be understood and 
to go gently through the world. 



VIII 
AT HOME* 

A robin teaches its own young to fly ; a human 
mother often leaves the training of her babies ex- 
clusively to others. The bond of nature between 
the mother and child puts a premium on all that 
the mother does, and her constant association is 
an opportunity for understanding the peculiarities 
and needs of the child such as no ordinary teacher 
ever obtains. 

As one's finger may trace in the yielding soil a 
channel for the outflow of a tiny spring, and at 
its fountain-head determine the course of a river, 
so in the earliest years the mother may, with lit- 
tle effort, give direction to the energies of the 
child. The mother's capacities, education, and 
circumstances may not permit her to accompany 
the child far on its course, or to contribute much 
to the current of its intellectual life ; but let her 
give the direction and all the powers of nature will 
conspire with the child's inborn force to increase 
the volume and strength of the onrushing stream. 

* Read before the Woman's Club at Melrose, Mass. , in March, 
1883, and published under the title "Mothers and Natural 
Science" in The Popular Science Monthly for October, 1890, 
from which, by permission, it is reprinted. 



200 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

To claim for natural-science studies the moth- 
er's power of direction, to show why mothers 
should interest their children in these studies, and 
to suggest how they may do so, is the purpose of 
this chapter. 

What mothers may do to interest children in 
natural science is a question which has but one 
answer — they may do everything ; what mothers 
can do has as many answers as there are mothers. 
Between the may and the can is but one barrier 
— difficult to destroy — the mother's own habits of 
thought. Not ignorance, not scarcity of materi- 
als, not want of books — not all of these combined 
need long block the way of any mother whose 
mind still has the suppleness and sincerity of 
childhood ; for the door into this kingdom of 
nature, like that into the kingdom of righteous- 
ness, is the simplicity of childhood. 

It would be well, in these days of the suprem- 
acy of the material life and of increasing demands 
for applied science, if young women who are pur- 
suing courses at our colleges would more often 
elect science studies, that they may be ready, by 
power to teach and by assistance and appreciation 
given to others, to further the introduction and 
pursuit of science studies in the lower schools, 
and to do this in a manner which shall help to 
put science in its true place as the handmaid and 
not the destroyer of religion. 

But it is to those who have passed their school 
and college days that this chapter is addressed. 
As no body gets so stiff that proper treatment 
cannot restore some of its lost pliancy, so no mind 



AT IIOME 201 

is so helplessly set that it cannot be drawn forth 
and directed into other molds. What a mother 
can do to interest her children in natural science 
depends upon her power to direct herself and to 
master the conditions of her life. Suppose that 
power is sufficient, how shall she begin % A moth- 
er may think that she needs trained guides, lest 
she make mistakes and waste precious time and 
strength. She may wish to know what materials 
to collect, what books to buy, when and where to 
get the materials and books, how much time and 
money they will cost, and what she is to do with 
them when obtained. Every mother has a right 
to ask these questions of any one who urges her 
to undertake to awaken in her children a vital in- 
terest in Nature's phenomena; but all that the 
writer can hope to do is to give suggestions which 
may lead a mother to find elsewhere the definite 
answers required. 

A mother may begin to study with her children 
the ever-changing phenomena that surround dai- 
ly life. The house is full of lessons. Various de- 
partments of science have contributed to its build- 
ing and furnishing. There is scarcely an industry 
that is not represented in some room. The kitchen 
is a laboratory in which the truths of chemistry 
and physics are illustrated, and the table is sup- 
plied with gifts from the three kingdoms of nature ; 
and to produce these, to transport them, and to 
prepare them for use, numberless natural agents 
have worked tirelessly and long. And out of 
doors — Nature's phenomena — where are they not? 
The snow and rain bring them ; the ice locks them 



202 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

across the pond, and the south wind picks the lock ; 
the breezes blow them, the birds sing them, the 
brooks murmur them. Every tree and flower, 
every stone and clod, wait to tell their story. The 
waves wash their treasures to the shore. The rain- 
bow is their expression. The glories of morning 
and evening write them on the skv. The sunlight 
comes and goes, bringing the wonders of night 
and day, of storms and seasons; and all night the 
stars speak of times and spaces our mathematics 
cannot yet compute and of events before which 
our short earth-lives shrink into nothingness. 

"What shall a mother take from this vast store 
to give to her children? Before answering this 
question it is proper to consider what purpose 
natural-science studies may serve in the education 
of a child, and to do this the objects of educa- 
tion itself must be known. The supreme object of 
education is, without doubt, the development of 
the individual to the utmost limits his conscious- 
ness can grasp in this earth-life. Some of the lesser 
objects are a vocation and success in it, pleasant 
social relations, ability to help the unfortunate, in- 
terest in national affairs, and a love of the virtues ; 
and all these may be included under the expression 
to be a good citizen. These objects imply health 
and industry, that the man or woman may be a 
producer and not a consumer only ; sufficient in- 
telligence to recognize and perform duties to one's 
self, to one's neighbors, and to the State ; speech, 
which is honorable and pure, and deeds which 
inculcate respect for the laws. Besides these a 
mother may wish her child to acquire those graces 



AT HOME 203 

of mind and heart that are difficult to define in 
words, but whose presence or absence is easy to 
feel in a man or woman; those graces which lift 
their possessor above the power of petty passions, 
of foolish conventionalities, above even the neces- 
sity to forgive injuries. 

Emerson, in speaking of Lincoln, said : " His 
heart was as great as the world, but in it there 
was no room for the memory of a wrong." From 
the days of earty manhood to the crowning act of 
his life, what a succession of kindly deeds are found 
in Lincoln's history ! As the mind dwells on them 
the great Proclamation is seen to be but the con- 
summate flower on a plant which could bear no 
other. Such men do not fail when the time for 
great action comes. They do without fear what 
lesser men shrink from or dally with until the time 
for action has passed. No small soul, no life full 
of petty motives, ever rises to a great emergency. 
To one who meets the details of every-day life 
with a vain, selfish spirit the great occasion may 
come ; but his will not be the honor of seeing it 
and of using it worthily. So if a mother would 
have her children become men and Avomen of the 
larger type she must look well to " the reiterated 
choice of good or evil which gradually determines 
character." 

What can natural sciences do towards this char- 
acter-building \ Have not studies other uses ? Yes ; 
but, while serving other uses, a study which does 
not mold character is of small value. This char- 
acter-building receives little or no consideration in 
much that passes for education — a mistake from 



201 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

which the whole after- life of the child suffers. 
There is at present a "craze for information," as 
though to be a storehouse of facts were a thing 
desirable in itself. Information so assimilated as 
to be a source of ready power in thought and con- 
duct is a great good, but unless so available it is 
of little value. The mere desire for cettino- infer- 
mation might well be called intellectual avarice, 
for he who seeks this alone is almost as useless and 
miserable as the more sordid hoarder of money. 
Also, there is an idea somewhat current in these 
days that for children study should be transformed 
into play. I must protest against any such no- 
tion. I lard, patient, honest Avork is needed. The 
child who plays at his studies will play at life, play 
at everything, and will probably carry from cradle 
to grave the deception that whatever does not 
furnish him amusement is of no value, that work 
belongs of right only to those miserable beings 
who have little capacity for amusement. There 
should be much delight in study, but there will be 
disagreeable drudgery as well, and any training is 
false which does not teach the child to do the 
drudgery promptly and faithfully. A mother who 
saves her child from disagreeable tasks does him 
the grave injury of sending him forth into adult 
life without the iixed habits which will enable 
him to meet its responsibilities with ease and 
dignity. 

For this development of a child info a worthy 
man or woman natural-science studies have pecul- 
iar fitness. To secure and preserve health, con- 
siderable knowledge of these studies is a necessity ; 



AT HOME 205 

and their relations to preparation for self-support 
are obvious. In the proper pursuit of natural- 
science studies the capacities for accurate observa- 
tion, for painstaking experiment, and for unbiassed 

sincerity are developed ; and without these capac- 
ities there can be no true progress in them. A 
slight prejudice introduced as a factor in estimat- 
ing a series of observations will vitiate the result, 
and may ruin the value of the whole work. Nat- 
ural-science studies are as exact ;is mathematics 
in demanding obedience to their own laws. Re- 
flection upon these considerations will show their 
value for intellectual development and training. 
The moral and spiritual influence of these studies 
is not less great. A child learns to be truthful in 
the presence of truth that never swerves; learns 
to be gentle when at work, where one rude touch 
may destroy tin; labor of weeks ; to be brave when 
In; sees the struggle which everything in Nature 
makes for its own development; to be patient in 
waiting for Nature's slow processes; persevering 
when he sees that she gives up her secrets after 
repeated efforts only, often to be made under cir- 
cumstances appalling to a spirit less mighty than 
her own ; modest when he and his little come 
into daily comparison with her and her abun- 
dance; obedient when h<3 sees that obedience to 
law brings beauty, pleasure, and life, and disobe- 
dience brings deformity, sorrow, and death; rev- 
erent before the majesty and power and glory of 
Him who is tin; life of Nature; generous, because 
she pours out her whole wealth to-day, never fear- 
ing that tin; morrow will care for itself; joyous, 



206 AN EXPERIMENT IN INDICATION" 

because above all her struggle and pain rises a 
perpetual pasan of triumph. 

If convinced that natural-science studies have 
special litness for tin; training of children, with 
what study shall a mother begin to work? Al- 
though Nature herself indicates an order which 
may be pursued with advantage, this order is not 
so important that it need be attempted where 
conditions do not favor it. This order takes, first, 
rocks and soils, with enough of chemistry and 
physics to explain some processes of soil and rock 
making; second, plants, as depending on soil, air, 
and sunlight- ; third, animal life ; and, fourth, man's 
structure. After this order has been observed 
through an elementary course enough to give a 
hint of the cycle of change from the rock world 
through the soil, plant, and animal, back to soil 
and rock again, to show the intimate dependence 
of Nature's kingdoms and processes —these studies 
may b(3 carried on together, a few weeks of each 
year being devoted to each one. This may be 
done until the student has reached the years when 
he may wisely devote himself to one branch as a 
specialty. Attention to the whole cycle of Nat- 
ure is not inconsistent with thoroughness, since 
(he little that is selected from each part may be 
thoroughly studied. A little work well done is of 
more value than to run over the whole field su- 
perficially, not only to the contents of the child's 
mind, but. to his growth in character. 

It matters little where one begins, so that the 

study be honest and thorough. Any beginning 
will lead everywhere else, for, though there are 



AT HOME 207 

straight roads for the specialists to follow, the 
whole field is covered by a most intricate network 
of roads. A mother may begin where her present 
knowledge is least liable to blunder. If she had 
a fondness for physics in her school days, let her 
take that. Let her teach her child the laws of 
mechanics as illustrated in his daily life and ob- 
servations. Let her teach him to drive a nail 
properly, and she teaches him to avoid the work- 
ing of the law of the wedge ; teach him how the 
windows are hung, and she introduces him to 
weights and pulleys ; show him a man unloading 
a barrel of flour at the door, and she shows him 
the inclined plane; in teaching him to use a pair 
of scales, a can-opener, a claw-hammer, a nut- 
cracker, she teaches him the use of levers. The 
wheel and axle may be taught from the well or 
the clock. 

The properties of bodies and the laws of expan- 
sion and contraction find abundant illustration in 
the daily life. Let the child fill an old jug with 
water, cork it tightly, and set it out of doors some 
cold ni^ht. The break found the next morning- 
will not be forgotten. Then take him to a neigh- 
boring ledge of rock; show him its cracks tilled 
with ice, and he will not be slow to draw the les- 
son of how the strong rocks are broken asunder. 
Then show the child the tiny snow-flake with its 
six crystal arms, so delicate that you hold your 
breath lest they vanish while you look; and lead 
him to see that the jug and the mighty ledge of 
rocks are broken by these fairy creatures. AVhat 
tale in mythology or folk-lore is more wonderful 



208 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

than this? In every drop of water is the fairy 
crystal spirit, but it. cannot embody itself where 
heat is. Cold is its good genius; and when cold 
comes the fairy spirit works, throwing out one 
dainty spar after another and interlacing them 
with threads more delicate than those in our finest 
laces; and the fairy spirit hasabody; the crystal 
exists. But if the water is confined and has uot 
room enough, why, these frail things break the 
bond, break the jug, break the giant rooks. II' 
this story be well taught the child's soul will bow 

before it in reverence. He will learn, loo, one old 
but great lesson whioh may be applied in human 

affairs "In union there is strength." The single 

ice crystal seems powerless; the many do mighty 

work. 

[f a, mother is fond of chemistry, she has no 
less a field of work from the combustion of find 
and the burning of the evening lamp to the whole 
process of cooking, digesting, and assimilating 
food. Here, too, comes the question of the pu- 
rity of air, water, and foods. A child may be 
taught to detect, some impurities in all these, and 
also to test the safety of colors in wall papers 

and in the fabrics used for clothing and furniture. 

These are but- a, few of the many topics close at 

hand for every mother fond of chemistry. Through 
all of this work in chemistry the mother has ad- 
mirable opportunity to impress on the mind of the 
child the great economy of Nature. As the child 
sees the wax of the evening candle gradually dis- 
appear, he may be made to understand, by a few 
simple experiments, that some portion of the air 



AT HOME 209 

is uniting with the wax; that invisible watery 
vapor and gas are produced and pass into the air, 
and that soot is given off. lie is then prepared 
to believe Nature's great law — change, but no loss. 
The child, once impressed by this law, will find 
abundant illustrations of it, and will seek to know 
and understand the changes which produce the 
seeming losses so constantly occurring. 

Perhaps some mother has a preference for as- 
tronomy. In warm evenings the little ones may 
sit out awhile to listen to stories about the stars. 
No subject is more delightful to a child. The lit- 
tle of the great truths which he can grasp will 
awaken and broaden his young mind and fill his 
tiny heart with noble and poetic sentiments. 

Botany, zoology, and physiology will suggest 
fields of work as boundless as they are interesting. 
It is not necessary to suggest special lines of work 
in each ; but let me urge that the intimate rela- 
tions of everything studied to the life of man 
should be kept before the child, so as to cultivate 
that sympathetic interest which tends to produce 
gentleness and humanity towards all things. The 
song-bird rids his garden of insects, and the pretty 
wayside flower furnishes him medicine. I>y in- 
visible but real bonds the life of man is united to 
the lowest animal and the smallest plant. 

While it does not greatly matter where a mother 
begins, it does matter that, as she goes on, the child 
see relations clearly. Hence arrange the work in 
logical sequence, and branch off soon into other 
fields, that the little mind may have a natural, 
broad base on which to arrange its treasures of 

14 



210 AN" EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

knowledge. All this, too, must be varied accord- 
ing to the age and tastes of the child. Rightly 
presented, any one of the subjects named will soon 
win the respect, love, and enthusiasm of any child 
not hopelessly spoiled by too early dissipation in 
artificial social life. Such studies are one of the 
best correctives of this evil, and I have seen them 
cure some painful cases of it. 

To a school where I was teaching there once 
came a child of nine, with manner and face plainly 
stamped with artificial life, and for weeks her 
teachers despaired of ever seeing any genuine, 
simple feeling. The child did not for a moment 
lose a painful self-consciousness which did not for- 
get to air her charms at the entrance of a visitor, 
or when she wore a new article of apparel, as she 
frequently did. The first time she was asked to 
make a bill of materials which she might buy- 
materials of any kind — simply to show how bills 
are written, her bill began : 



To one pink satin ball -dress. ... 

" one pair white kid boots $15, 

and proceeded through eight or ten similar items 
of fancy and expensive dress. After our first va- 
cation of one week this child returned with a glad, 
eager look on her face, and, going close to her 
teacher, said : " I am so glad school has begun 
again! There is nothing interesting going on at 
home." From that day her manner gradually 
changed ; she came to love the stones, flowers, 
and animals which we studied, and her lace lost 
its blank, soulless look, and became sweet and gen- 



AT HOME 211 

tie. This change in expression was so marked as 
to be spoken of by a frequent visitor. 

Materials for study in any department of natu- 
ral science are so abundant that it seems almost 
unnecessary to touch upon this topic. The greater 
abundance of botanical and zoological material in 
summer invites to those studies at that season, 
while physical and chemical studies may quite as 
well receive attention in winter ; but with care and 
a small outlay in money any of these studies may 
be pursued at any season. A window - garden, 
where a child may plant seeds at varying inter- 
vals and then pull them up and examine the whole 
plant at different stages of growth, is possible at 
any season ; but this better be done in early spring, 
when the vegetation starting out-of-doors in- 
creases the interest of the child and supplements 
his work. 

The preservation of materials and the formation 
of collections are important. Encourage the child's 
efforts in this direction. Let the bo}^s and girls 
make shelves, boxes, or cabinets in which to keep 
the collections. A set of wood -working tools 
and ability to use them will be a useful adjunct 
to natural-science study. 

Whatever a child collects should be received 
with a smile of encouragement, no matter how 
worthless it is, until he has gained some power of 
discrimination. Let a mother refrain from show- 
ing disgust or fear of any natural object — even of 
toads, spiders, and snakes — lest she foster in the 
child the common superstitions which attach harm 
to innocent creatures. And if the child brings a 



o|2 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

handful of Progs' eggs, sticky and dripping, the 
mother better not say, " Now go away and throw 
those horrid, dirty things out; I will not have 
the house filled n|> with them," and proceed to 

cliidc him for soiling liis clothes and dripping 
water on the oarpet. Let her show the child she 
is pleased with what he has done; get a jar in 
which to put the eggs ; cull the child's attention to 
the tiny dark spot, in each egg\ awaken Ins Inter- 
est l>v belling him how the eggs were deposited 
and why they are fastened together in such a ge 
latinous mass, and that if he keeps them and gives 
them fresh water a little animal may come out of 
eaoh one. This will keep alive the spirit of inves 
tigat ion ; and, after all this has been done, she may 

show the child how he might have kept from soil 

ing his olothes and the carpet. A mother should 
never make fun of a ohild or laugh at his prefer- 
ences, but try to enter into the ohild's thoughl and 

recline;', and, having done this, she may lead him 
to what she wishes. She should he patient, too; 

for, while the ohild's perceptions are often more 

keen and true than hers, he will find it hard to 

follow her reasoning prooessesand to see relations 

which are very simple to her. A mother should 
teach kindness by her own treatment of helpless 
Creatures. Let her not crush the insect in the 

house, nor pull the weed from the garden with 

anger or impatience, hut teach her child respect, 

and kindness for all life until he has reached years 
when he can clearly distinguish between necessity 
and oruelty. 

Be glad when questions are asked ; hail them. 



AT HOME 313 

if they grow naturally from the lessons, as the 
dawn of a good day for the child. Never say, 
as many a mother (and, alas ! many a teacher) does, 
in answer to a child's question, "Oh, that is too 
hard For you; you must wait until } r ou are older." 
Is it surprising that children so treated lose cour- 
age and go through life thinking of every new 
difficulty, " Oh, that is too hard for me." There 
is a simple side to every subject; and if a child 
comprehend not a tenth of what is said, he is 
helped and satisfied by the effort to treat him as 
an intelligent being. If the child cannot answer 
the mother's questions or his own, he should, if 
possible, be sent to Nature herself to find the an- 
swer, the mother giving only so much help as to 
direct his attention and insure his finding the an- 
swer within a reasonable time. 

The child himself should handle the objects, 
manipulate the materials in experiments, make 
and record observations, and so learn to give ac- 
curate attention and to keep exact accounts of 
what is seen, to use his own hands and eyes, to do. 
lie who can do as well as think is twice armed 
against poverty or misfortune. 

Accidents may be turned to account, not only 
to teach how to avoid them, but the immutability 
of Nature's laws. The sooner a child finds that 
Nature never forgives a sin against her, the better 
for his health and happiness. I know one mother 
who has taught her child to see the relation be- 
tween headaches and candy ; and so well he under- 
stands it that now, at ten years of age, he does 
not over-indulge, although the favorite sweets 



214 AX EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

stand always on the library - table within his 
reach. 

Take advantage of any unusual phenomena. 
The last transit of Venus was a chance not again 
offered in the lives of ourselves or our children, 
and every one might have seen it through a piece 
of smoked glass. A recent railroad-cut exposed 
fine examples of ripple-marks, which will soon be 
buried from sight by falling earth. After some 
storms there are exceptional opportunities for les- 
sons in physical geography and geology. Such 
chances are of more value than many things for 
which we put them aside. 

The relation of natural-science studies to health 
and to the mental and moral culture of children 
has been suggested. Their industrial uses are 
familiar to all ; so intimately are they connected 
with the life of man that knowledge of any 
branch makes one more capable in the conduct of 
his life. The relations between these studies and 
the great workshops of the world may with ad- 
vantage be pointed out until the child feels the 
mighty pulse of the world's work and acknowl- 
edges his debt of service and brotherhood to all 
men. The habits of mind produced by continual 
contact with things, forces, phenomena, and laws 
promote clearness of insight and ability to look 
over a wide field, and to gather the facts neces- 
sary to form right conclusions. These are the 
habits which give success in business. 

Another important advantage in the study of 
the natural sciences is found in their relation to 
invention. The emancipation of man from con- 



AT HOME 215 

tinuous manual toil is the prophecy which Science 
has already uttered ; and she but waits the men 
to put her forces at work in the right ways to 
fulfil this prophecy. A child rightly started has 
before him the possibility of doing some of this 
needed work, and so adding to the sum of human 
knowledge and comfort. If he does not do this, 
he will have the understanding which will appre- 
ciate and encourage the labor of others ; and if 
his pursuits early lead him quite away from the 
impetus to those studies which his mother may 
have given in childhood, still her labors will be 
rewarded by the increased enjoyment which touch 
w T ith Nature adds to any life. 

For mothers who have acquired little or no 
knowledge of natural science, it may be well to 
indicate some of the best sources of information 
and direction. For the most elementary works, 
Appletons' Science Primers and Ginn & Co.'s 
Guides to Science Teaching are among the best. 
For more advanced standard books, the works of 
Dana, Le Conte, and Geikie in geology, of Dana 
and Brush in mineralogy, of Gray and Bessey in 
botany, of Packard and Huxley in zoology, of 
Huxley and Martin in physiology, of Remsen in 
chemistry, of Meyer, Wright, and Ganot in phys- 
ics, of Newcomb and Young in astronomy, are 
among the best. 

Better than books are the collections of a well- 
arranged museum, if they are by good-fortune ac- 
cessible. If possible, use them with the children, 
not for the amusement of an idle hour, but as 
teachers speaking more directly from Nature's 



216 AN EXPERIMENT IX EDUCATION 

heart than books can do. Also better than books 
is contact with a living teacher, and association 
with others interested in the same work. Such 
help may be sought with assurance that one will 
seldom fail of kindly welcome and of all possi- 
ble assistance. The Agassiz associations, whose 
president is Mr. Harlan II. Ballard, whose head- 
quarters are at Pittsfield, Mass., will furnish any 
mother with the opportunity of putting herself in 
contact with w r orkers in this field, and of getting 
invaluable aid and inspiration. 

Thus far in this paper the benefit of the study 
of natural science to the child only has been con- 
sidered. But what of the mother? Truly, what 
increases the well-being of the child must increase 
hers also; but is there no personal gain to her 
apart from her child ? Will it be nothing to be 
introduced to Nature, and to become a welcome 
guest where one has been a comparative stranger? 
Will it be nothing to leave the artificial and con- 
ventional, where so many masks are worn, and 
make friends with Nature, who cares nothing 
about dress, income, or pedigree ? 

Few mothers have not felt the renewal of youth 
which comes when in the woods, on the mountain, 
by the shore; have not found their cares slipping 
insensibly from them when gazing into the depths 
of the sky, listening to the murmur of a brook, or 
inhaling the sweet breath of the summer wind. 
Let me assure these mothers that every step in 
the study of any natural science will open more 
wide the door through which Nature will pour 
such healing 1 balm. 



AT HOME 217 

O mother, tired with housekeeping, give your 
family simple, uncooked fruit for dessert ; let pud- 
dings and pies go unmade, and give the time so 
saved to the pursuit of enduring pleasures ; finish 
the little dress with a few less ruffles, and fashion 
for your child's mind a garment which cannot 
fade or grow old ; make fewer calls on your fash- 
ionable friends and more to the wood-lot, the open 
meadow, and the running brook; lay aside the 
latest novel, and go 

"Read what is still unread 
In the manuscripts of God"; 

do not stop to gossip about the newest scandal, 
your neighbor's new bonnet or forthcoming par- 
ty, but pause and bend your ear in the quiet places 
where the secrets of all life are told. 

You have many hinderances in fashion and con- 
ventionalities. Do you wish you could stop and 
live differently — live more simply ; wish you could 
offer family and guest alike simple bread, vege- 
tables, and fruit without the fuss of the many 
courses and interminable combinations which con- 
sume time and often ruin the digestions and tem- 
pers of those who partake of them; wish you 
could get a few simple, artistic patterns for your 
own and your children's garments, and use them 
year after year without all this harassing discus- 
sion of what is style and fashion ; wish you need 
go to no large parties, or ever give any, but let 
the few chosen friends come when they desire 
and take you and your home life as they find 
them ? Do you wish all these ? Then prove the 



218 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

desire by making them all true. But you answer, 
"I cannot unless everybody else does." 'Tis the 
old story of " foxes and tails." We actually fol- 
low the maxim, "Your conscience, not mine "; and 
forever is asked, not, Is it right? but, What will 
they think? 

Why not make these radical changes? Every 
step of progress was once a difference which some 
brave spirit bore alone. Instead of fearing to be 
different, one may be proud and thankful to have 
found a better way to live : " The great world 
will come round to you." 



part HID 

SUGGESTIONS ABOUT THE ATMOSPHERE 
OF SCHOOL-ROOMS 



"ART FOE ART'S SAKE" 

To learn for the pure love of knowing; to do 
for delight in activitj^ ; to make beauty for beau- 
ty's sake — this is the natural state of all children ; 
and most children would continue in that state if 
they could be removed from an atmosphere that 
seethes with effort to make money at any risks ; 
and some would remain in that state longer than 
they do if not so often told that their activities 
are useless. 

To do from spontaneous choice, without refer- 
ence to use or reward ; to do because doing is de- 
light — here all children begin ; but when pushed 
or drawn from this path few return, and those 
few after long wanderings in the miry ways of 
doing for use and gain. 

Not that use and gain are illegitimate, but that 
both use and gain are most highly served where 
they are not the chief end, or are altogether out 
of account. It is not labor per se, but the motive 
for labor, that is applauded or despised. Indolent 
natures may need a spur, but circumstances usually 
provide all that a man can bear ; and it is doubtful 
if any man lias ever been benclitcd by the posses- 
sion of a conscience morbid on the subject of use. 



222 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

New England puritanism gave such a con- 
science to our country, and some of the reckless 
demoralization and extravagant waste of this gen- 
eration is doubtless Nature's reaction on that con- 
science. What is desired to point out here is that 
this conscience, in theory at least, survives in 
church and school, and in one way and another is 
forced upon the children of this day. 

And market value, or ability to take the place 
of something that is marketable, is made the cri- 
terion of use, so that a child grows to feel that 
until he can make or be what will sell he is of no 
account. He is educated in order to sell himself 
or his products to the highest bidder in the world's 
markets. 

The result of this is that in the average nature 
all the movements of being that are not in accord 
with this marketable current are stifled. A few 
exceptionally strong natures refuse to be so en- 
gulfed, and strike out new channels only to be 
made use of to force into some new turn of the 
marketable stream those who come after them. 

To delicate, shrinking natures this is suicidal to 
their finer possibilities, and to all natures a bane- 
ful, warping influence. 

No teacher can hope to counteract or to annul 
to any great extent the home and social influences 
of his pupils. He can create a different atmos- 
phere at school, and whatever recuperative power 
there is in that atmosphere for the nature of child- 
hood will bear its due effect during the time which 
the child remains in it. This is too limited to al- 
low hope of great changes in the natures of pupils 



"ART FOR ART'S SAKE " 223 

save under teachers with exceptional native en- 
dowments. Probably the average teacher carries 
into his school-room no new or different atmos- 
phere ; he is himself the product of the market- 
able current. 

But there are parents and teachers who, though 
themselves such products, have thoughts of better 
things, and would be glad to give their children 
and pupils something better than they have ex- 
perienced. 

For these it may be possible to take the title of 
this chapter as the spirit of the atmosphere which 
they wish to create ; to provide opportunities for 
all forms of activity, and to encourage activity for 
its own sake ; to give as much time as possible to 
labors that are not and cannot — at least, for some 
years — become marketable; to keep away all 
sorts of rewards that in themselves have a money 
value, and to never pay nor hire a child to do rea- 
sonable services for himself or for others. These 
are some of the ways by which the marketable 
tendency may be checked. 

The noblest acts which history has recorded 
have been done without consciousness of reward, 
often with consciousness of disaster to self as a 
probable or certain result ; and in one's own indi- 
vidual life the high-water mark of excellence is 
most often reached when gain, use, and self are 
lost sight of. Self, as doer, is always intrusive ; 
self, as receiver of reward in money, praise, or hap- 
piness, is a demoralizing element from whose pres- 
ence the nobler parts of man's nature flee away. 

There has never been a time in recorded history 



224 AN EXPERIMENT IK EDUCATION 

when to labor for gain merely was not a reproach 
in the eyes of the nobler classes, and probably 
there are few such laborers who have not at some 
time felt degraded by it. 

A universal feeling of this sort has meaning:. 
Unfortunately, the feeling has been allowed to ex- 
tend to labor itself, probably because so few can af- 
ford to labor with no thought of self or rewards in 
view; but this consideration obscures the question. 
The generous - minded man delights in services 
that cannot be paid for, and feels humiliated by all 
unwilling services that necessity forces from him, 
and by being forced to take pay for willing service. 

This universal feeling can be neither childish nor 
unreasonable, and its undying presence, in the se- 
cret recesses of our minds, is a perpetual criticism 
on a commercial and social condition that makes 
man the slave of rewards and of necessity for self- 
sustenance. Man holds himself within as free, hav- 
ing choice of when and how he shall toil, while 
outwardly he is slave only — bending his back, mov- 
ing his limbs, and regulating his speech and even 
his affections according to the dictates of circum- 
stance, his master. 

The faith of the lily and the sparrow may be 
impossible to this generation; but if children could 
be kept from all consciousness of rewards while 
their capacities for the various activities were de- 
veloped to the point of skill, particularly in the 
lines of greatest aptitude, there might be more 
men for whose labors returns were so generous that 
self-sustenance is easily lost sight of, and labor for 
its own sake remains the ruling motive. Still we 



"ART FOR ARTS SAKE" 225 

like not to think that the slow and the stupid can- 
not have the same chance, and that smartness must 
be at such premium. 

Spontaneous labor for its own sake is to a man 
what pla}^ is to a child. The adult's conception of 
play is by no means the child's conception. To a 
child play is labor — is the focusing of all his pow- 
ers in a buoyant, exuberant, happy activity. He 
learns the play laboriously, detail by detail, con- 
scious of his awkwardness and inefficiency. When 
it is learned he delights in its repetition until it 
has become so easy that it no longer stimulates to 
effort. Effort constitutes the chief charm — to feel 
power and to use it, until it becomes what play is 
to an adult, is what makes the thing delightful to 
the child. After that, repetition is stultification 
until he has had time to partially forget. 

So of a man : that act in which all power is 
focused in a real enthusiasm expresses the man's 
self, and for that act he refuses pay until his inner 
nature has sunk to the level at which he bends his 
self-respect to his needs. 

It has been said that art arises in such moods 
only, when the being of man, freed from sordid 
cares, is focused to a high level of spontaneous 
movement. Could children be kept from greed of 
gain perhaps a new art movement would arise. 

Also, one occupation, unless it involve varied and 
frequent change of activity, sinks a man to the 
level of a slave. He is then no nobler in his labors 
than a machine. If gain must be thought of, let 
there be as many channels of it as possible ; that 
is, never turn a child out with one skill only ; not 

15 



226 AX EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

that if market demands in one fail he may turn to 
another, but that in all states of market demands 
he may have variety of activities and interests. 

Concentration of life on one activity usually 
produces mediocrity only. Those who have been 
the instruments of the world's advance in science, 
in letters, and in moral purpose have usually been 
men and women of varied attainments ; so much 
so that if the one thing for which each is most 
remembered were taken away the person would 
still be eminent in some other field. 

There is a sense in which use is the last and the 
only criterion of excellence, and the phrase "Art 
for art's sake" becomes foolishness. The indi- 
vidual consciousness drops what is not used, and 
the art of forgetting is as valuable as the art of 
remembering ; so the general consciousness refuses 
to carry useless impedimenta, and forgets the per- 
son whose labor does not become essential to some 
man's welfare. There is an after -delight in all 
fruitful activity — that of having produced some- 
thing relatively permanent — and no healthy nat- 
ure can long emancipate itself from the desire and 
the hope of being useful. 

If all are parts of one whole and are moved by 
one intelligence, spontaneous, joyous activities 
would naturally take the line of use. If, then, a 
child were educated so that the bent of his inner- 
most nature should freely flow in his labors, those 
labors would be all-sufficing for his sustenance and 
a reasonable social position, as well as useful to his 
fellow-men, without his being the slave of a morbid 
self -consciousness about deserts and gain. 



II 

METHOD 

In this age method is carried to extremes. That 
man who can only tell what he does, but not ex- 
actly how nor why, is not of much account. Yet 
the finest acts are never methodical, never accord- 
ing to rule; and this is part of their charm — that 
the element which lifts the act above ordinary oc- 
currences of the same kind is mysterious and in- 
communicable. When the secret is found out, and 
the ordinary man repeats the process according to 
exact formula, the result has not the same charm. 
In the process of formulation the act has lost a 
volatile essence — the personal equation of the first 
actor. 

Men say of such acts that they are inspirations 
of genius. But what is an inspiration of genius 
but the unconscious act of a man who is superior 
to the limitations of method? 

Method is the master of the fearful and the 
feeble-minded, but to the strong it is a tool only, 
and no teacher should forget this fact. We have 
had " Pestalozzianism," " Objective Teaching," 
" The New Education," and other phrases to des- 
ignate a method or methods guaranteed to turn 
out a superior sort of youth, and perhaps the 



228 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

reader has thought that this book is designed to 
inculcate a new method. May the gods preserve 
the book from, such a fate! Not method, but 
matter; not how, but what; not quantit}^ but 
quality, is its aim. 

There are many ways of producing results, and 
when a teacher ensnares his personal equation — 
the spontaneous movement of his own judgment 
and common-sense — in the meshes of a method 
his school-room becomes no longer a free place. 

This does not mean that he should have no 
plans, no system, but that he should feel free to 
vary or reject all plans and all systems. The 
"new" psychology begins to talk about what it 
will do for education — begins to give directions 
about physical exercises which will produce certain 
definite intellectual and moral results. That virtue 
can be taught is an idea as old as Plato, but be 
wary of that man who has an infallible recipe for 
the details of the process. 

A quick intelligence, the saving salt of common- 
sense, a touch of humor, a trifle of courage, and 
an inexhaustible power of loving — these are the 
indispensable qualities of a good teacher ; and with 
these a teacher may dare to handle all methods 
which have ever been known or used by mankind 
for the education of youth, sure that each will 
prove useful in some degree. 

If a teacher chooses to divide the mind up into 
compartments, to label each, and then to devise 
special exercises for each, he may do the child in- 
estimable good, provided that he hits upon the 
right exercise fur the right child ; and if he does 



METHOD 229 

not, he should, by use of the qualifies mentioned, 
find out the fact before the child has received any 
injury. 

The child is not so tender a plant, neither is his 
time always so valuable, that it will hurt him to 
learn the alphabet or the multiplication table in 
the ways of our grandfathers ; but it will hurt him 
— it may be irretrievably — to spend several hours 
a day, five days per week, in the presence of a 
teacher whose methods are immovably fixed, how- 
ever good they are. 

Variety is essential to health of mind and 
morals as well as of body. Sameness produces 
nausea in one case quite as soon as in the other. 
A mountain may be climbed a dozen times with 
almost equal zest, provided that a new path is taken 
each time; and it is the new path, as well as the 
new mountain, that childhood, as well as manhood, 
perpetually craves. 

The what is of first importance: that decided, 
as to quality and amount, the how becomes im- 
portant; and let it be said here that no " how" is 
infallible or equally useful in all cases. 

It has been said that it does not matter what 
you teach a child, provided that the best method 
is used ; for method makes power, cultivates and 
trains faculties, and leaves its impress in habits ; 
and that right habits are the only valuable result 
of learn in gr. It mi^ht as well be said that it mat- 
ters not what one eats, provided that he eats it 
daintily, with due regard to good form. 

Activity is not nourishment, and to bring about 
nervous and muscular connections bv exercise of 



230 AN" EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

parts, when there is left no indelible impress of 
anything more than the activity, is about as use- 
less as to make a net-work of roads in a desert 
country where there are no inhabitants. 

Get the inhabitants first, be sure of their quality 
and permanence, and the roads will follow, whether 
any method is used or not. Better winding cow- 
paths between worthy settlers than no settlers and 
the straightest roads in Christendom. 



Ill 

THE SCHOOL AS ENVIRONMENT 

American children have sensitive organizations, 
and all children easily take on the impression of 
their surroundings. Every object and phenome- 
non is a stimulus to which the child's nature re- 
acts, consciously or unconsciously, with more or 
less power; and any stimulus frequently repeated 
leaves an impression in the child's organization 
which is presumably indelible. 

Science tells us that from birth to the age of 
twelve the brain undergoes its maximum of ex- 
pansion, and that what cells shall expand and 
what remain abortive, and the extent and qual- 
ity — that is, the nature — of the expansion in any 
given cell must depend on the time, quality, and 
frequency of the stimuli that reach the child. 
During this period connections between cells are 
begun, and this process goes on presumably through 
life. 

If this be true, it may reasonably be inferred 
that the ground-plan of a given child's possibilities 
is determined before the age of twelve. If no ex- 
pansions of cells take place after that age, or very 
slight expansions, the limits within which that 
mind shall work are fixed. It is presumable, also, 



232 AH EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

that no opportunity later in life can extend those 
limits, or do more than set up such connections 
and co-ordinations of activity as are possible 
within them. 

If there be such limits and so early fixed, it be- 
hooves every educator to take the fact into serious 
consideration, in order that the child's environment 
before the age of twelve shall be favorable to a 
general, symmetrical, and desirable expansion. 

Science has so far located brain areas which cor- 
respond to activities in the various members and 
organs of the body as to give some direction to 
the physical exercises which aid expansion in 
those areas ; but as a healthy child spontaneously 
uses all members and organs while kept happy 
and supplied w T ith incentives to movement, so 
much of brain expansion might, under favorable 
conditions, be left to nature's own demands and 
instincts in the child. 

It would be pleasant to think that nature is no 
less capable to expand all brain areas, those still 
unknown — that is, unmapped — by science, as well 
as the known, and that man has only to provide 
a healthy, happy mental environment, and the 
child's own instincts would do the rest. This is 
probably true; but what constitutes a healthy, 
happy mental environment is harder to determine 
than a physical environment of such qualities as 
apparently affects the physical life only. 

The physical life is a door to the mental life ; 
and whether or not each material thing has an 
immaterial essence which affects the soul of man, 
each physical stimulus leaves a mental impres- 



THE SCHOOL AS ENVIRONMENT 233 

sion j and the total physical environment is the 
most tangible cause of a given mental result. 

These facts, if they be facts — and they certain- 
ly have some basis in scientific investigation — 
make the physical surroundings of a child before 
the age of twelve of more importance than is gen- 
erally conceded. 

Have the slums of a great city ever produced a 
genius or even a very capable man? Many a fine 
nature has been bred in poverty, but it has been 
poverty in the country or a small town where 
nature's riches made up to the child for the lack 
of such opportunity as money provides. It is an 
interesting fact that Lincoln, about whose poor 
be£innin£: so much has been said, never knew the 
humiliations of inferiority during his formative 
period. A splendid constitution made his physical 
privations eas} T . His neighbors were as poor as 
himself ; he had all nature, and was the master 
and not the slave of his environment and circum- 
stances. 

The country school-house may not be an impor- 
tant factor in a child's environment, although the 
lovelier the surroundings, the more tasteful the 
building and its furnishings, the better ; but the 
city school-house is one of the chief elements of 
beauty or ugliness in the child's life. To many a 
city child the school-room is the only opportunity 
to dwell in familiar intercourse with a fine interi- 
or. Home and streets are hopelessly sordid and 
vulgar, and for such the school-room is the only 
avenue for nobler stimuli. 

" Unto ever} 7 one that hath shall be given ; but 



234 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

from him that hath not, even that which he hath 
shall be taken away," seems peculiarly true in 
education, as though to have were a magnet of 
irresistible force. The noblest buildings and the 
loveliest interiors which a city can afford to build 
are generally put in the best residence portions, 
where the home life equals or surpasses the school 
life. Why not reverse this process, and trust the 
same law of attraction to do for one child through 
the home and for the other through the school if 
the school-rooms cannot be made equally beauti- 
ful in all parts of the city? 

Noble proportions, delicate, pure, harmonious 
colorings, plenty of light, abundance of fresh air 
and of heat, scrupulous cleanliness and order, hy- 
gienic seats and desks, and a general impression of 
artistic arrangement — these are essential. A gen- 
eral impression of loftiness, beauty, and comfort is 
of greater value than any isolated, small details 
of beauty can be. 

Plants in windows and pictures on walls are 
not necessarily desirable. If plants interfere with 
the proper ventilation of the room, any aesthetic 
or scientific good which the children may derive, 
or be supposed to derive, from them is more than 
counterbalanced by the stupefying, deadly effects 
of the vitiated air. 

Small photographs from paintings of the old 
masters, if hung so that they are above the chil- 
dren's heads when seated, and on wall spaces so 
huge in comparison that they are mere blotches 
on it, produce an effect the reverse of what is in- 
tended. This is not meant to discourage the use 



THE SCHOOL AS ENVIRONMENT 235 

of plants and pictures, but to show the futility of 
some aesthetic efforts that are made. 

A picture to produce an appreciable proper ef- 
fect as an artistic stimulus should be so large and 
so placed that its details are easily seen by the 
child when seated in any part of the room, and 
should harmonize with the proportions and fur- 
nishings of the room. 

Small pictures may be kept in drawers where 
children can look them over ; and the more of a 
good sort there are, and the more freely children 
are allowed to handle them on rainy-day recesses, 
the better; but they should not be hung where 
they produce scrappy, untidy, or inelegant effects. 

How much more true is this of the tinsel so 
often seen in school-rooms ! The writer has visit- 
ed kindergartens — even those drawing patronage 
from the most cultivated families — where the 
amount of tawdy, ill -arranged decoration was 
enough to disgust a sensitive adult. When will 
parents learn that because a child is a child any- 
thing is not good enough for it, and that to sub- 
ject its delicate, plastic, so easily impressed organ- 
ization to frequent stimuli from sights or sounds 
that would irritate a refined adult is criminal, 
for it is nothing less than the vulgarizing of the 
child's nature ? 

The aesthetic limits of a child's nature are large- 
ly determined by what his environment gives of 
artistic expansion before the age of twelve. Think 
of it, parents, who give your children coarsely col- 
ored, rudely formed toys and send them to school- 
rooms which you would not be willing to be re- 



236 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

sponsible for as an expression of your own tastes 
and natures! Think of it, teachers, whose own 
limits have been fixed, who vainly beat at the 
bars of those limits trying to realize what to an- 
other is so easy — limits, perhaps, made by the very 
misfortunes which you now surround the child 
with in decorations over which you have some 
control ! 

The aesthetic element permeates the whole man ; 
is a sort of spice that determines the flavor of all 
that he does and thinks so long as he lives. 

The child who lives in the country, who dances 
with bare feet on the tender spring turf, wades in 
brooks, climbs trees, welcomes the birds and flow- 
ers and knows their haunts, who plays or works 
all day long within sight and sound of the ever- 
changing beauty of sky and earth, from winter to 
summer and summer to winter — this child has a 
chance to gain and to keep the power to respond 
to the highest in art, literature, and morals, such 
a chance as a child of the same social level in the 
city does not have. 

The city child whose dwelling is far from parks, 
whose playground is the streets, and whose house 
is of the sort which poverty necessitates in cities 
— this child has little to stimulate that finer ele- 
ment ; and whatever spice he does get for the sea- 
soning of his nature is usually of a poor quality. 
For these children — and they are thousands — the 
only refuge which can be supplied at present is 
the school-room ; and surely something more can 
be done than yet has been. 

The teacher is himself a part of the child's en- 



THE SCHOOL AS ENVIRONMENT 237 

vironment. Positive ugliness and a conspicuous 
deformity should be disqualifications for any 
school -room below a college, and for children 
under twelve something more than negative 
points should oe required. 

A teacher with a large mouth which was rare- 
ly closed, and an ugly protrusion of the upper jaw 
which brought large, ill-shaped teeth conspicuous- 
ly into view, was selected by a college professor 
and put in charge of a kindergarten for children 
of well-to-do people. This woman's smile was 
disagreeable, and her mouth at all times unpleas- 
ant to look at. Does any one suppose that chil- 
dren from three to five years old could look at 
that mouth for several hours each day, five days 
a week, through nine months of the year, without 
hurtful impressions from its distortions ? 

Not alone the figure but the care of the person 
and dress should be taken into account. Cleanli- 
ness first of all, daily cleanliness of person and 
dress ; and then delicacy of texture and color and 
simple grace in outline should be the conspicuous 
features of the dress. 

The breath also is important. A dirty breath 
is as much out of place as a dirty face, and the 
teacher who does not watch the quality of the 
one as much as the cleanliness of the other has 
not yet quite realized what good manners are. 

Each child in a school helps form the environ- 
ment of eveiy other, and the parent who lets his 
own child go unkempt hurts the natures of all 
other children with whom his child comes in con- 
tact. It ought to be possible for school boards 



238 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

and teachers to regulate the cleanliness of person 
and clothing of every child whose parents are neg- 
ligent in this matter. A bath-room and an attend- 
ant for it, a wash-room and a laundress, and some 
extra suits of clothing to be loaned to the chil- 
dren, with bill for such services sent to all parents 
who were able to pay them — these would soon 
cure some of the worst evils of this sort ; and few 
cleanly people realize the nature or the extent of 
the uncleanliness in the persons and clothing of 
the vast majorit}^ of children in city school-rooms, 
particularly during the colder months. 

These are the tangible elements of the school as 
environment, the elements which may be directly 
controlled. 

The intangible elements are the already deter- 
mined nature of the teacher and the plastic, form- 
ing natures of the children : and the tangible ele- 
ments are as nothing to these intangible ones 
Avhen the latter are powerful. 

A negative, indifferent, commonplace teacher 
does no special harm nor good; and under the 
care of such the tangible elements and the stud- 
ies are all-powerful for good or ill, according to 
their quality and the way the teacher happens to 
use them. The teacher is, then, a mere channel 
through which the studies flow and the various 
other elements of the school as environment are 
ordered or disordered. 

On the other hand, a teacher sometimes has a 
self so individual, original, and strong that it dom- 
inates any sort of environment that is within the 
range of its own limitations. When evil, this 



THE SCHOOL AS ENVIRONMENT 239 

teacher does incalculable harm ; when good, ines- 
timable good. 

Most teachers are neither the one sort nor the 
other, and must be thought of as having personal 
equations that are influential but not all-powerful. 
Most adults on looking back can classify their 
teachers according to this element of personal 
power, and estimate the good or ill effects of it 
on their own natures. If sensible of it after the 
lapse of years, how much more so in childhood 
when it was a daily, living reality, making or 
marring the beauty and the glory of life. 

Mothers should take this matter to heart. Some 
of them are sensitive and intuitive enough to de- 
termine the possible ill or good effects of a given 
teacher merely by being a short time in that teach- 
er's presence; and they — the mothers — should try 
to regulate the appointment of all teachers of chil- 
dren under twelve years of age. 

The writer sometimes wonders if ever the time 
will come when those first twelve years — those 
years of so great possibilities and so great results 
to the whole after-life — will be deemed too precious 
to* intrust to servants and mediocre } x oung men and 
women and given over to the wisest and the love- 
liest of our race, and when nurseries and school- 
rooms will be as carefully proportioned and dec- 
orated as the best parlors and public assembly- 
rooms for adults now are. In view of the interest 
at stake, this seems little to ask, and yet its real- 
ization looks like a far-off, Utopian dream. 



IV 
MIRTH IN THE SCHOOL-ROOM 

The moral atmosphere of school-rooms is often 
too grave. The teacher takes himself, his occu- 
pation, and his pupils too seriously. A spirit of 
mirth — not of levity, nor of triviality, but of that 
mirth which is the natural expression of a healthy, 
happy nature — this should be latent in all school- 
rooms, ready to break loose and sweep children and 
teachers temporarily off their feet on any legiti- 
mate occasion. 

A really merry face is rare, even among chil- 
dren — not, it is to be hoped, from lack of native 
capacity to be merry, but from the strenuousness 
of life and the sordidness of thought about money 
and social position which children are allowed to 
share, even in well-to-do families, and forced to 
consider and serve among the less well-to-do. 

It is not labor nor the sharing in the thoughts 
and plans of parents which ages a child's face — save 
in extreme poverty, where there are real privations 
to be endured — but the motives for the labors and 
plans and the artificial forcing which makes a child 
conscious of what he would otherwise long remain 
unconscious of. 

A teacher cannot change these conditions in the 



MIRTH IN THE SCHOOL-ROOM 241 

home nor in the social life of the child, nor hope 
to materially undo or annul their effects; but if 
his own heart has not become sordid or soured by 
the sordidness of others, he can make an atmos- 
phere in his school-room in which the natural, care- 
free, merry state still possible to the child shall 
unfold, expand, and drive out for the time the 
other influences. This will give an opportunity 
for the better side of the child to grow. 

To be free, to be his real, innermost self is what 
a child needs, and what, alas ! many an adult craves 
with a hopeless, aching heart. 

The capacity to be merry needs development 
and training like any other capacity, and just as 
the human voice needs training in speech and song, 
so does it in laughter. A clear, ringing, delicate, 
merry laugh is so good to hear that it is quite 
worth while to teach it to a child ; so that when 
his heart is merry and occasions arise he may ex- 
press his mirth easily and gracefully, with charm 
to himself and to others. 

Laughing exercises of the right sort are whole- 
some to the whole being of the child. They ex- 
pand the lungs, deepen and sweeten the voice, give 
control of the breath, and quicken the circulation ; 
and, while doing these services for the body, they 
gladden the heart, because a child cannot join in 
a laughing exercise without reaching the point 
of natural laughter; and not until that point is 
reached and the natural laughter regulated and 
controlled does the exercise reach its highest 
value. 

Laughter is sometimes repressed as bad form, as 

10 



242 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

though an expression of mirth in laughter were 
not as natural as joy in song. 

But mirth must not always be artificial in its 
beginning in the school-room, although such, exer- 
cises will do to train the voice and to form a habit 
of delicate, graceful, toneful laughter. The teacher 
must seek and must make occasions for spontaneous 
mirth, and in so doing cultivate and refine the 
sources of mirth in the child. 

Stories that are funny without being cruel or 
indelicate, humorous occasions about town, epi- 
sodes among the children themselves — these should 
be used to train the child to a discriminative sense 
of humor that is without malice; and to see the 
humor of his own conduct or condition quite as 
simply as he sees that in another's, and to take the 
laugh on himself as gayly as he shares in it on an- 
other's account. 

Aside from occasions for mirth and from exer- 
cises for the refining of mirth's expression, a gen- 
eral atmosphere of all-pervading cheeriness should 
be in every school-room, casting its happy halo 
around the head of every child. It is the teacher 
alone who can create and preserve this atmos- 
phere, and this only by being really, truly, merry- 
hearted at all times. This is wellnigh impossible 
to some adults, at times difficult to all ; but it pays, 
in the lon£ run, as nothing else does for a teacher 
to cultivate this spirit. It is a preservative of 
health of body and sanity of mind for both him- 
self and his pupils. 



CONCLUSION 

A human educational experiment station does 
not exist. The average school -room is like the 
average farm. The farmer follows the ways of 
his fathers, slowly and uncertainly takes on new 
ways ; and at the first signs of apparent failure 
of a new way reverts at once to the old. So the 
teacher timidly takes to new subject-matter or 
new methods, and tends to revert to the educa- 
tional ways of his childhood. 

In education this is partly due to the fact that 
there is no considerable body of ascertained, au- 
thoritative, scientific fact about education. The 
scientific expert has not yet adequately treated 
the child. In many places statistics are being 
gathered about certain mental phenomena of 
childhood ; but these are of no more value in 
education than similar statistics about farming 1 
would be to agriculture. 

The crude, undefined, uncertain notions of the 
average farmer about soils, plants, fertilizers, in- 
sect pests, etc., are of little value save to empha- 
size human ignorance and the incapacity of the 
average man to reason or to experiment rational- 
ly or to give an intelligible and reasonable ac- 
count of the faith that is in him about agriculture. 



244 AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION 

So the average child's account of his tastes, no- 
tions, mental processes, ideas, etc., by any process 
of questioning, may reveal what is self-conscious 
in the child, or can be made so by a question ; but 
it tells next to nothing about the unconscious side 
of child life or about the capacity of the child to 
have had a different self-consciousness. 

Science perpetually asks the limits of capacity 
to change in a living thing ; that is, the sum total 
of capacity with which nature has endowed that 
form of life, and seeks answer not alone nor chief- 
ly by observation of what is, but by experiment 
of what may he. To bring to bear a totally new 
and different set of stimuli on a living thine? is 
to learn the capacity of response in that thing to 
those stimuli, and there is no other way of finding 
out. Moreover, the different set of stimuli may 
have to be presented gradually by many interven- 
ing and carefully graded steps to bring out the 
full capacities of that living thing in the direction 
of those stimuli. 

So with the child. What he is to-day is no 
sure measure of what he may be to-morrow. The 
mental and moral content of his consciousness 
under present conditions of home and school en- 
vironment do not tell his capacity to have a dif- 
ferent content, and science knows no way of de- 
termining capacity for different content, nor the 
extent in quantity and quality of it save by ex- 
perimentation. 



If a man would speak with force lie must speak as though 
lie knew; and all the while he may be conscious that he 
knows nothing, and that his "best thinking is little more than 
a groping about in the dark. So feels the author in closing 
this book. 



MIND-TEAINING 



THE EXTRAORDINARY RESULT OF TESTS OF THE 

POWERS OF ATTENTION AND MEMORY 

MADE IN MANY CLASS-ROOMS. 



Miss Aiken's methods for cultivating powers of quick percep- 
tion, attention, and memory are summed up by Dr. G. Stanley 
Hall, President of Clark University, as follows : 

" Wishing- to test the exact extent to which attention 
and memory conld be cultivated in children, and also in 
older students, I wrote a simple story containing one 
hundred items, and which could be read aloud in three 
minutes. This story I caused to be read by a stranger 
to the scholars in hundreds of schools — grammar and 
high schools, college-preparatory schools, colleges, and 
universities — in this country and in England. The re- 
sults have been tested by psychological experts, and 
Miss Aiken's school stands six per cent, better than the 
best." 

The simple methods employed by Miss Aiken are fully 
described in the following publication, which has ex- 
cited much interest in the educational world : 

METHODS OF MIND-TRAINING. Concentrated 
Attention and Memory. By Catharine Aiken. 
pp. 110. Ten Illustrations. Svo, Cloth, $1 00. By 
mail, $1 09. 

HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers, New York 



MENTAL AND MOEAL SCIENCE 



BOWNE'S PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS. By Borden 
P. Bowne, Professor of Philosophy in Boston Uni- 
versity, pp. xv., 309. 8vo, Cloth, $1 75. By mail, 

$1 90. 

It is the best book in the field. — B. P. Raymond, President of 
Wesleyan University, Connecticut. 

BOWNE'S METAPHYSICS. A Study in First Prin- 
ciples. By the same Author, pp. xiv. 534. 8vo, 
Cloth, $1 75. By mail, $1 90. 

To read this thoughtful volume will be a wholesome intellectual 
discipline, as well as a strong confirmation of faith in revealed re- 
ligion as the true philosophy of the universe and of man. — Zion's 
Herald, Boston. 

BOWNE'S PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. By the 

same Author, pp. x., 270. 8vo, Cloth, $1 75. By 
mail, $1 90. 

One of the simplest in statement and clearest in thought of the 
many works on this subject. — Critic, N. Y. 

DEWEY'S PSYCHOLOGY. By John Dewey, Ph.D. 
pp. xii., 428. 12mo, Cloth, $1 25. By mail, $1 39. 

His method is the true one, and he will have laid the colleges of 
the country under a great debt in having led the way in this (for 
this country) new and only correct method of treating psychology. 
— Dr. E. Benj. Andrews, President of Brown University. 

DAVIS'S DEDUCTIVE LOGIC. By Noah K. Davis, 
Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the 
University of Virginia, pp. 218. Cloth, 90 cents. 
By mail, 99 cents. 

It would not be difficult to point out in this small work at least 
half a dozen distinct gains to the science. — Professor Collins Denny, 
Vanderbilt University. 

DAVIS'S INDUCTIVE LOGIC. By the same Au- 
thor, pp. 204. 12mo, Cloth, $1 00. "By mail, $1 09. 

Like its companion, a masterpiece. — Supt. J. T. Murfke of Marion 
(Ala.) Military Institute. 



HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers, New York 



